John Ray Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on 8th February. His father was a construction worker and mother was a homemaker. After moving to several places his family finally settled in Southaven, Mississippi, in 1967. During his childhood days, he had an ambition of becoming a proficient baseball player. He also struggled to get into the Delta State University team, but failed. He then realized that he didn’t have the perfect skills and eventually shifted gears into an accounting career. He attained a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Mississippi State University in 1977. He also earned his Juris Doctor degree in 1981 from the University of Mississippi School of Law.
He started his law practice and continued this practice for almost 10 years in Southaven, specializing in personal injury litigation and criminal defense. During law practice, he came into politics when he was elected as a democrat to the Mississippi’s State House of Representatives in 1983 and handled his responsibility until 1990. In his second term, he was became vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee, and was a member of the Judiciary A, Military Affairs Committees and Insurance. His political life was going absolutely fine, but after some time he felt boredom due to slow pace of state legislature. Soon, his life turned to a new path when Grisham witnessed the shocking evidence of a twelve-year-old rape sufferer. This incident inspired him to write a novel emphasizing on the subject – discover what would have occurred, just if the girl’s father had killed her attackers.
Starting a novel along with a responsible job was easy but he managed to do it and took three years to complete this novel named A Time to Kill. Grisham finished the novel in 1987 and got it published in June 1988 after number of rejections by publishers. The day Grisham completed his first novel ‘A Time to Kill’, he began to write a next novel named ‘The Firm’. It was about a young lawyer attracted to an actually law firm that was not actually what it seemed. By the time his ‘A Time to Kill’ was already a grand hit. Quickly, he came on the map after he sold the rights of ‘The Firm’ to Paramount amount to $600,000. Grisham’s writing profession took the fast pace and earned reputation as the master of the legal thriller.
The Pelican Brief, his next creation hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Grisham’s success took another gear when A Time to Kill was reprinted in the hardcover by Doubleday and then in paperback by Dell. Grisham and his wife Renee have two children Shea and Ty. Grisham and his family split their time between a plantation near Charlottesville in VA and their Victorian home on a farm in Mississippi. Apart from writing Grisham also devoted most of his time in different charitable causes. He contributed for Gulf Coast relief due to Hurricane Katrina. He is still in touch with his supreme longtime enthusiasm, baseball. Grisham, the man who once dreamed of becoming a proficient baseball team member is now serving as the local Little League official.
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John Grisham at BookExpo America 2011
