Inspiration for first novel

In 1984 at the De Soto County courthouse in Hernando, Grisham witnessed the harrowing testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim. According to Grisham's official website, Grisham used his spare time to begin work on his first novel, which "explored what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants."  He "spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, the manuscript was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who gave it a modest 5,000-copy printing and published it in June 1988."
The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." That second book, The Firm, became the 7th bestselling novel of 1991. Grisham then went on to produce at least one work a year, most of them widely popular bestsellers. He is the only person to author a number-one bestselling novel of the year for seven consecutive years (1994–2000).

Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural south, while continuing to pen his legal thrillers.

Publishers Weekly declared Grisham "the bestselling novelist of the 90s", selling a total of 60,742,289 copies. He is also one of only a few authors to sell two million copies on a first printing; others include Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.Grisham's 1992 novel The Pelican Brief sold 11,232,480 copies in the United States alone.

Courtroom re-appearance

Grisham returned briefly to the courtroom in 1996 after a five-year hiatus. According to his official website, he "was honoring a commitment he made before he had retired from the law...representing the family of a railroad brakeman killed when he was pinned between two cars...Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career." Another tie to the legal community that he continues to hold is his seat on the Board of Directors for the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating the innocent through DNA testing after they have been convicted.

Named in libel suit

On September 28, 2007, Grisham was named in a civil suit in a US District Court, claiming Grisham libeled Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, District Attorney Bill Peterson and Gary Rogers, a former Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent. Peterson and Rogers claim that Grisham, along with two other authors, conspired to defame their character through their books. The suit is based on Grisham's sole non-fiction effort, The Innocent Man, a book about the investigation of the murder of a cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, and the exoneration by DNA evidence of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz more than 12 years later.

John Grisham Room

The Mississippi State University Libraries, Manuscript Division, maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials generated during the author's tenure as Mississippi State Representative and relating to his writings


Grisham's lifelong passion for baseball is evident in his novel A Painted House and in his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the baseball movie Mickey, starring Harry Connick, Jr.. The movie was released on DVD in April 2004. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.

Grisham is also well known within the literary community for his efforts to support the continuing literary tradition of his native South. Grisham has endowed scholarships and writer's residencies in the University of Mississippi's English Department and Graduate Creative Writing Program, and was the founding publisher of the Oxford American, a magazine devoted to literary writing and famous for its annual music issue and copies of which include a compilation CD featuring contemporary and classic Southern musicians in genres ranging from blues and gospel to country-western and alternative rock.

In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book and that his favorite author was John le Carré.