Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on February 8, 1955 to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Now he is one of the most outstanding best selling authors of the currently known world.

He took up residence in Southaven, Mississippi, in 1967 and received an undergraduate degree in accounting from Mississippi State University in 1977 and then attended law school at the University of Mississippi, where he earned a law degree in 1981. That same year, he married Renee Jones. He established a law practice in Southaven, where he practiced both criminal and civil law. In 1983, he was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives.

After graduating from law school he worked for almost ten years in Southaven and his specialization was in criminal defense and personal injury. Elected as State House of Representatives in 1983, he served until 1990.

One day at the Dessoto County courthouse, Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants. Getitbusng up at 5 a.m. every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually bought by Wynwood press, who gave it a modest 5,000 copy printing and published it in June 1988.

His next novel, The Firm, triggered his career and was one of the biggest hits of 1991, spending 47 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and becoming the longest-selling paperback on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list. In 1990, before the novel was published, Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights for $600,000. That same year, he resigned from the House of Representatives and bought a farm near Oxford, Mississippi.

The Pelican Brief, starring Julia Roberts as a Tulane law student, was released the following year and was another major hit. The Clientand The Chamber enjoyed similar best-seller status, and in 1994 The Client became yet another hit film, this time starring Susan Sarandon in a role that earned her an Oscar nomination. When A Time to Kill was sold to Hollywood, Grisham received $6 million and final say over the script and casting.

Americans may say they hate slick lawyers, but they sure love to read about them--Grisham's novels have been translated into thirty-one languages. At home in Oxford, Mississippi, life is hardly a trial. Mrs. Grisham edits her husband's manuscripts while he coaches Little League.

Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1989, Grisham has written one novel a year (his other books are The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Partner, and The Street Lawyer), and all of them have become bestsellers, leading Publishers Weekly to declare him "the bestselling novelist of the 90s" in a January 1998 profile. There are currently over 60 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 29 languages. Six of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, and The Chamber), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man.

In August 1994, he expanded his list of job titles to include publisher as well, when he rescued The Oxford American, a struggling magazine based in the town of its title, from financial destitution.

In 2000, Grisham published A Painted House serially in the magazine. The novel, set in 1952 Arkansas, is, as Grisham readily admits, a departure from his usual style of novel. In a letter to readers, he writes, " A Painted House is not a legal thriller. In fact, there is not a single lawyer, dead or alive, in this story. Nor are there judges, trials, courtrooms, conspiracies or nagging social issues." The novel was published as a single volume edition in 2001.

In the spring of 2001, it was reported that Grisham had written the screenplay for the film Mickey, about the world of Little League baseball. Grisham also is serving as producer for the movie, which is being directed by Hugh Wilson and stars Harry Connick, Jr.

When he's not writing, Grisham devotes time to charitable causes, including taking mission trips with his church group. He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. The six ballfields he built on his property have played host to over 350 kids on 26 Little League teams.

Grisham lives with his wife Renee and their two children Ty and Shea. The family splits their time between their Victorian home on a farm in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, VA.

Selected works:

• A Time To Kill, 1989
  Clanton, Mississippi. The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young man. The mostly white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. Until her black father acquires an assault rifle - and takes justice into his own outraged hands. For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client's life...and then his own...
  
  
• The Firm, 1991
  Mitchell McDeere, raised in the coal-mining region of rural Kentucky, has worked hard to get where he is: third in his class at Harvard Law. He's young. He's bright. He's ambitious. Mitch could have the pick of the big firms in New York and Chicago, but he's chosen the Memphis tax firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. They're selective. They pay outrageous salaries. They have a turnover rate of zero. And Mitch is about to find out why. Several events fuel Mitch's growing suspicions: two of the partners die in a suspicious diving accident off Grand Cayman; the senior partners seem unduly proud of the fact that no one has ever resigned; and security measures at the office are, even for a company with billionaire clients, more than a little extreme. Then Mitch makes an explosive discovery: The firm is owned and operated by the most powerful organized crime family in Chicago. Even as Mitch discovers the truth, he finds himself caught between the FBI, who wants an informant inside the firm, and the firm itself, which will make him a very rich man - or a very dead one.
  
  
• The Pelican Brief, 1992
  Late one October night Justice Abe Rosenberg, at ninety-one the Supreme Court's Liberal legend, is shot to death in his Georgetown home. Two hours later Glenn Jensen, the Court's youngest and most conservative justice, is strangled. The country is stunned; the FBI has no clues. But Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student at Tulane, thinks she has the answer. Days of digging through the law library's computers have led her to draft a brief speculating on an obscure connection between the two justices - and a most unlikely suspect. Her suspect has powerful friends: one evening, outside a New Orleans resautorbusrant, Darby narrowly escapes an assassin's car bomb. Someone has read her brief - someone who wants her dead. Alone and frightened, Darby disappears into the anonymous shadows of the French Quarter, where she contacts the investigative reporter Gary Grantham and convinces him that Washington's position on the killings amounts to the biggest cover-up since Watergate. Together they go underground on the run, trying to stay alive long enough to expose the real truth contained in the Pelican Brief.
  
  
• The Client, 1993
  In a weedy lot on the outskirts of Memphis, two boys watch a shiny Lincoln pull up to the curb...Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother were sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance encounter with a suicidal lawyer left Mark knowing a bloody and explosive secret: the whereabouts of the most sought-after dead body in America.
  
  
• The Chamber, 1994
  A thriller about a rookie lawyer defending a member of the Ku Klux Klan who has been on Death Row for 23 years and faces the gas chamber. The lawyer hates his client's racist views, but as the case develops, it appears that his client may be innocent.
  
  
• The Rainmaker, 1995
  John Grisham tells the story of a young man barely out of law school who finds himself taking on one of the most powerful, corrupt, and ruthless companies in America - and exposing a complex, multibillion-dollar insurance scam. In his final semester of law school Rudy Baylor is required to provide free legal advice to a group of senior citizens, and it is there that he meets his first "clients", Dot and Buddy Black. Their son, Donny Ray, is dying of leukemia, and their insurance company has flatly refused to pay for his medical treatments. While Rudy is at first skeptical, he soon realizes that the Blacks really have been shockingly mistreated by the huge company, and that he just may have stumbled upon one of the largest insurance frauds anyone's ever seen - and one of the most lucrative and important cases in the history of civil litigation. The problem is, Rudy's flat broke, has no job, hasn't even passed the bar, and is about to go head-to-head with one of the best defense attorneys - and powerful industries - in America.
  
  
• The Runaway Jury, 1996
  Every jury has a leader, and the verdict belongs to him. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a landmark tobacco trial with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake begins routinely, then swerves mysteriously off course. The jury is behaving strangely, and at least one juror is convinced he's being watched. Soon they have to be sequestered. Then a tip from an anonymous young woman suggests she is able to predict the jurors' increasingly odd behavior. Is the jury somehow being manipulated, or even controlled? If so, by whom? And, more important, why?
  
  
• The Partner, 1997
  They watched Danilo Silva for days before they finally grabbed him. He was living alone, a quiet life on a shady street in a small town in Brazil; a simple life in a modest home, certainly not one of luxury. Certainly no evidence of the fortune they thought he had stolen. He was much thinner, and his face had been altered. He spoke a different language, and spoke it very well. But Danilo had a past with many chapters. Four years earlier he had been Patrick Lanigan, a young partner in a prominent Biloxi law firm. He had a pretty wife, a new daughter, and a bright future. Then one cold winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car and died a horrible death. When he was buried his casket held nothing more than his ashes. From a short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial. Then he fled. Six weeks later, a fortune was stolen from his ex-law firm's offshore account. And Patrick fled some more. But they found him.
  
  
• The Street Lawyer, 1998
  He gave up the money. He gave up the power. Now all he has left is the law. Michael Brock is billing the hours, making the money, rushing relentlessly to the top of Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm. One step away from partnership, Michael has it all. Then, in an instant, it all comes undone. A homeless man takes nine lawyers hostage in the firm's plush offices. When it is all over, the man's blood is splattered on Michael's face-and suddenly Michael is willing to do the unthinkable. Rediscovering a conscience he lost long ago, Michael is leaving the big time for the streets where his attacker once lived-and where society's powerless need an advocate for justice. But there's one break Michael can't make: from a secret that has floated up from the depths of Drake & Sweeney, from a confidential file that is now in Michael's hands, and from a conspiracy that has already taken lives. Now Michael's former partners are about to become his bitter enemies. Because to them, Michael Brock is the most dangerous man on the streets....
  
  
• The Testament, 1999
  Troy Phelan is a self-made billionaire, one of the richest men in the United States. He is also eccentric, reclusive, confined to a wheelchair, and looking for a way to die. His heirs, to no one's surprise-especially Troy's-are circling like vultures. Nate O'Riley is a high-octane Washington litigator who's lived too hard, too fast, for too long. His second marriage in a shambles, and he is emerging from his fourth stay in rehab armed with little more than his fragile sobriety, good intentions, and resilient sense of humor. Returning to the real world is always difficult, but this time it's going to be murder. Rachel Lane is a young woman who chose to give her life to God, who walked away from the modern world with all its strivings and trappings and encumbrances, and went to live and work with a primitive tribe of Indians in the deepest jungles of Brazil. In a story that mixes legal suspense with a remarkable adventure, their lives are forever altered by the startling secret of The Testament.
  
  
• The Brethren, 2000
  Trumble is a minimum-security federal prison, a "camp", home to the usual assortment of relatively harmless criminals - and three former judges who call themselves the Brethren: one from Texas, one from California, and one from Mississippi. They meet each day in the law library, their turf at Trumble, where they write briefs, handle cases for other inmates, practice law without a license, and sometimes dispense jailhouse justice. And they spend hours writing letters. They are fine-tuning a mail scam, and it's starting to really work. The money is pouring in. Then their little scam goes awry.
  
  
• A Painted House, 2001
  The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." Farm boy Luke Chandler, age seven, lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.
  
  
• Skipping Christmas, 2001
  
  
• The Summons, 2002
  Law professor Ray Atlee and his prodigal brother, Forrest, are summoned home to Clanton, Mississippi, by their ailing father to discuss his will. But when Ray arrives the judge is already dead, and the one-page document dividing his meager estate between the two sons seems crystal clear. What it doesn't mention, however, is the small fortune in cash Ray discovers hidden in the old man's house--$3 million he can't account for and doesn't mention to brother Forrest, either. Ray's efforts to keep his find a secret, figure out where it came from, and hide it from a nameless extortioner, who seems to know more about it than he does, culminate in a denouement with an almost biblical twist. It's a slender plot to hang a thriller on, and in truth it's not John Grisham's best in terms of pacing, dramatic tension, and interesting characters (except for Harry Rex, a country lawyer who was the judge's closest friend and in many ways is the father Ray wishes he'd had. He's so vivid he jumps off the page)
  
  
• The King of Torts, 2003
  
  
• Bleachers, 2003
  
  
• The Last Juror, 2004
  
  
• The Broker, 2005
  
  

Bibliography:

• John Grisham, Robyn M. Weaver, 1999
• John Grisham: A Critical Companion, Mary Beth Pringle, 1997
• John Grisham: A Reader's Checklist and Reference Guide, Checker Bee Publishing, 1999