john grisham biography

John Grisham

Born on February 8, 1955, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, John Grisham worked as an attorney and Mississippi legislator before becoming a best-selling novelist with works like The Firm , The Pelican Brief  and A Time to Kill , all of which were turned into hit films. Grisham has continued to publish an array of titles, such as Bleachers  and The Litigators , and has also worked in screenwriting, as seen with the 2003 baseball film Mickey .

Background and Early Career

John Grisham Jr. was born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The second-oldest of five siblings, he developed a love for books early on. Grisham and his family moved around for a while, due to job opportunities for his father, who worked in construction, eventually settling in Southaven, Mississippi. Initially thinking of a pro baseball career and working a variety of jobs before college, Grisham went on to study accounting at Mississippi State University and then law at the University of Mississippi, graduating in 1981.

Grisham wed Renee Jones in May of that year, with the couple going on to have two children. After starting his law career as a tax attorney, Grisham set up a practice doing personal injury and criminal defense work in Southaven, and in 1983 he earned a seat in the state legislature on the Democratic ticket, serving through the rest of the decade.

Signs to House with 'The Firm'

During a trial in 1984, Grisham heard the horrifying details of a young girl recounting her experience of surviving rape. This catalyzed the attorney to start writing a novel that examined the issue, focusing on the actions of a fictional father and an attorney. The finished book, A Time to Kill , would initially get a 5,000-copy printing from Wynwood Press.

Array of Best Sellers

While writing his next novel,  The Pelican Brief , Grisham took the words of a retail chain executive to heart and made the commitment to complete a book a year. The Pelican Brief was published in 1992 and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. In the coming years, Grisham followed with an array of hit titles, including The Client (1993), The  Runaway Jury (1996), Bleachers (2003), Playing for Pizza (2007) and The Litigators (2011), among many others. His Time to Kill sequel, Sycamore Row , was released in 2013. More recent titles include Gray Mountain (2014), Rogue Lawyer (2015) and The Whistler (2016).

Grisham has worked in other literary genres outside of the adult novel as well, as seen with his nonfiction work The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006), the short-story collection Ford County and the young adult series  Theodore Boone .

Hit Film Adaptations

Besides The Firm , numerous other Grisham books have been turned into major big-screen ventures, including Pelican Brief (1993), The Client (1994), A Time to Kill (1996), The Chamber (1996), The Rainmaker (1997), Runaway Jury (2003) and Christmas with the Kranks (2004), which was based on Grisham's 2001 novel  Skipping Christmas . With a changing movie-industry climate, over time Grisham has increasingly turned to the world of television, with The Firm becoming a NBC series in 2012.

Grisham has continued to nurture his love for baseball, overseeing the construction of multiple baseball fields around his home and becoming a Little League commissioner. He has also provided funding for the Southern publication Oxford American .

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1955
• Birth date: February 8, 1955
• Birth State: Arkansas
• Birth City: Jonesboro
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: John Grisham is a best-selling author known for many of his legal thrillers, such as ‘The Firm,’ ‘The Pelican Brief,’ ‘A Time to Kill’ and ‘The Runaway Jury.’
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• University of Mississippi
• Mississippi State University
• Occupations

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: John Grisham Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/john-grisham
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 16, 2019
• Original Published Date: March 2, 2015
• [Writing] was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.
• My name became a brand and I'd love to say it was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.
• I wanted to be Tom Sawyer. I loved that romanticized view of a kid's life. It wasn't until a lot later that I realized there was more going on with Tom and Huck than just an adventure.
• After you write 10 or 12 books in a certain genre, you think, 'OK, can I write something else, or am I locked in here?'
• ...if I can take the wrongful execution of a man in Texas to make people stop and think about this rush to execute people that we have in this country, I will. If I have access to a soapbox, then the least I can do is occasionally use it.

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John Grisham

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John Grisham (born February 8, 1955, Jonesboro , Arkansas , U.S.) is an American writer, attorney, and politician whose legal thrillers often topped best-seller lists and were adapted for film. Grisham became one of the fastest-selling writers of modern fiction .

Grisham grew up in Southaven, Mississippi . After he was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1981, he practiced law and served (1984–89) as a Democrat in the Mississippi state legislature. Then, inspired by a trial he observed in 1984, Grisham took three years to write his first novel , A Time to Kill (1989; film 1996 ), which deals with the legal, social, and moral repercussions when a Mississippi Black man is tried for the murder of two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter. Despite good reviews for its skillfully crafted dialogue and sense of place, the novel failed to sell.

Grisham vowed to “take a naked stab at commercial fiction” with his next novel, The Firm (1991; film 1993, TV series 2012), about a law school graduate who is seduced into joining a Memphis law firm that turns out to be a front for the Mafia . The selling of the film rights prompted a bidding war for publishing rights, and within weeks of the book’s release it appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for nearly a year, allowing Grisham to give up his law practice and move with his family to a farm in Oxford , Mississippi. In the meantime, A Time to Kill , reissued in paperback, sold more than three million copies.

Grisham wrote his third novel— The Pelican Brief (1992; film 1993 ), about a female law student investigating the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices—in only three months. There were 5.5 million copies of the book in print by March 1993. Film rights to the novel were sold for more than $1 million. Another novel, The Client (1993; film 1994), sacrificed roller-coaster suspense for humour and slapstick energy. Critics almost universally agreed that the plot, dealing with an 11-year-old boy who uncovers a mob-related murder plot, read as though it had been tailor-made for the screen. Indeed, the film rights to the novel sold for $2.5 million, while the novel itself sold 2.6 million copies within 15 weeks. Grisham continued his success with such titles as The Chamber (1994; film 1996), The Rainmaker (1995; film 1997 ), The Runaway Jury (1996; film 2003 ), and The Testament (1999).

In 2001 Grisham detoured from his formulaic legal thrillers with A Painted House (television film 2003), the story of a farm boy from rural Arkansas who discovers a troubling secret in his small town. Other nonlegal novels followed, including Skipping Christmas (2001; film 2004 as Christmas with the Kranks ), Bleachers (2003), Playing for Pizza (2007), Calico Joe (2012), and Sooley (2021). The crime thrillers Camino Island (2017) and Camino Winds (2020) centre on a female writer.

However, Grisham also maintained his steady output of legal fiction , with The Summons (2002), The Last Juror (2004), The Appeal (2008), The Litigators (2011), The Racketeer (2012), and Gray Mountain (2014) among his later works in the genre . In Sycamore Row (2013)—a follow-up to A Time to Kill , centring on the lawyer from that book, Jake Brigance—Grisham returned to the racial politics that drove the events of the first novel, this time examining their impact on a case involving a contested will. Rogue Lawyer (2015) chronicles the adventures of a criminal defense attorney who enjoys taking on seemingly hopeless cases, and The Whistler (2016) is about judicial misconduct. The Rooster Bar (2017) centres on three law students struggling with debt who discover that both their school and their student-loan bank are owned by a questionable Wall Street investor. Grisham’s later legal thrillers included The Reckoning (2018), about a decorated World War II soldier who kills a pastor after returning to Mississippi, and The Guardians (2019), in which a lawyer attempts to exonerate a man convicted of murder. In A Time for Mercy (2020), Grisham continued the story of Jake Brigance, who defends a teenager accused of murder.

His first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006), explores a 1982 murder case that resulted in two Oklahoma men being wrongfully sentenced to death row . In 2009 Grisham published the short-story collection Ford County . The following year saw Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer , the first installment in a series of young-adult novels. Sequels included Theodore Boone: The Abduction (2011), Theodore Boone: The Accused (2012), Theodore Boone: The Activist (2013), Theodore Boone: The Fugitive (2015), Theodore Boone: The Scandal (2016), and Theodore Boone: The Accomplice (2019).

John Grisham

• Born February 8 , 1955 · Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
• Birth name John Grisham Jr.
• Height 6′ 1″ (1.85 m)
• A graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, John Grisham obtained his law degree in 1981 and practiced law for about 10 years, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. He was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983 and served until 1990. He gave up his law practice to write full-time. He began writing in 1984, and three years later finished his first novel, "A Time To Kill", published by Wynwood Press in June 1988. He is the best-selling author of "A Time to Kill", "The Firm", "The Pelican Brief" and "The Client". He lives with his wife and their two children on a farm in Oxford, Mississippi. - IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Nonymous
• His mother was a housewife. He has four siblings. Grisham spent part of his childhood and youth in Southaven, Mississippi. He attended high school there. One of his early career aspirations was that he wanted to be a baseball player. But then he began studying law at Mississippi State University. Grisham was already active as a writer during his student days. He completed his studies in 1981. In the same year he married Renee Jones. He opened a law firm specializing in criminal court cases. In 1983 and 1987 he was a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives for the Democratic Party. A rape trial in 1984 was the initial spark for Grisham's literary work. This is how his crime novel "A Time to Kill" (in German: "The Jury") was written in 1989, in which he included his experiences and impressions from the rape trial. John Grisham offered the work to numerous publishers, but he received rejections everywhere. Then it was accepted by an unknown publishing house and published with a circulation of only 5,000 copies. From 1990 he lived as a professional writer after giving up his legal and political activities. The breakthrough came with his second work, the 1991 title "The firm", published in German with the title "Die Firm". The book became an international bestseller. At the same time, "The Jury" was released again. In 1993, "The firm" was made into a film by Sydney Pollack, with the participation of film stars such as Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise. Starting in 1992, John Grisham produced a book every year. The author was also internationally successful with works such as "The Pelican Brief" (1992, German: "The File"), "The Client" (1993, German: "Der Klient"), "The Rainmaker" (1995 , German: "The Rainmaker"), "The Street Lawyer" (1998, German: "Betrayal") and "The Brethren" (2000. German: "The Brotherhood"). This was followed by the novels "A Painted House" (2001) and "The Summons" (2002, German for "The Judge"). His complete work also includes the screenplay "The Gingerbread Man". Grisham became known for the fact that his criminal stories took place in the legal and judicial environment. The title "The Pelican Brief" was made into a film starring Julia Roberts. Although his novels follow a simple pattern, John Grisham became one of the most successful writers of the 1990s. Grisham has sold over 65 million books translated into 32 languages. In 2006 he published the title "The Innocent Man". "The Associate" and "The Confession" followed in 2009 and 2010. John Grisham lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and Oxford, Mississippi. He has a son. The author is a strict Baptist and supports charitable projects. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
• Spouse Renée Jones (May 8, 1981 - present) (2 children)
• Writes novels about main characters that are from the Southeastern United States
• Writes novels that are usually based around the justice system
• His first novel 'A Time To Kill' took three years to complete and was rejected by 28 publishers.
• Has casting approval rights for movies based on his novels.
• Has sold 60,742,288 copies of his books, making him the best-selling author of the 1990s.
• Donated $5 million after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and Mississippi.
• Is totally opposed to the concept of cameras in courtrooms.
• I grew up in a very small, close-knit, Southern Baptist family, where everything was off-limits. So I couldn't wait to get to college and have some fun. And I did for the first two years. And I regret a lot of it, because my grades were in terrible shape. I never got in serious trouble, except for my grades.
• Runaway Jury (2003) - $8,000,000
• The Chamber (1996) - $3,750,000
• A Time to Kill (1996) - $6,000,000
• The Firm (1993) - $100,000

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John grisham, bestselling author, i had a story. it was a courtroom drama. i was doing a lot of courtroom work. i was a very young lawyer. i was sort of consumed with this story. and one night i just said, ‘okay. i’m going to try to capture it, see what i can do with words.’ and that’s what happened..

John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas. His father, a cotton farmer and itinerant construction worker, moved the family frequently, from town to town throughout the Deep South, settling in Southaven, Mississippi in 1967. Although his parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and insisted that he prepare himself for college.

By his own account, John Grisham had no interest in writing until after he embarked on his professional career. For his first two years in college, he drifted. He attended three different colleges before earning a degree. After abandoning a youthful dream of a professional baseball career, he settled down to study accounting and prepare for a career as a tax lawyer. While in law school, his interest shifted from tax law to criminal law and litigation. After graduating from the University of Mississippi law school, he returned to Southaven and established a small private legal practice. He was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983. By his second term he held the vice chairmanship of the Apportionment and Elections Committee, as well as memberships on the Insurance, Judiciary “A” and Military Affairs Committee.

In Mississippi, attorneys in private practice are sometimes called upon to appear as public defenders for indigent clients. In this way, Grisham received invaluable experience of the criminal justice system. Inspired by a case he observed in a Mississippi courthouse, Grisham decided to write a novel. For years, he arrived at his office at five o’clock in the morning, six days a week, to work on his first book, A Time To Kill. His manuscript was rejected by 28 publishers before he found an unknown publisher who was willing to print a short run. Without the benefit of a major publisher’s marketing apparatus, the novice author went directly to booksellers, encouraging them to stock his book.

Although A Time to Kill  only sold a disappointing 5,000 copies, Grisham had already begun work on a second novel,  The Firm . At the same time, bored with the routine of the state capital and eager to spend more time with his family, he decided not to seek re-election to the state legislature. He closed his office in Southaven and moved his family to Oxford, Mississippi, hoping to concentrate on his writing.

At age 36, his career as a novelist bloomed when movie rights to The Firm were sold for a hefty price, even before the book had found a publisher. The Firm sold more than seven million copies and spent 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. With the success of The Firm , John Grisham finally gave up his law practice to write full-time. He has returned to the practice of law on only one occasion since, in 1996, to win a settlement for the family of a railroad worker killed on the job. Meanwhile, he has continued to write enormously successful legal thrillers at the rate of nearly one a year. As of this writing, seven of his books — The Chamber , The Rainmaker , The Street Lawyer , The Testament , The Brethren , The Summons and The Broker — were the bestselling novels of their respective years.

Beginning in 2001, Grisham has occasionally departed from the format of the legal thriller to write works of fiction on other subjects, particularly baseball and life in the rural South. The first of these was A Painted House , followed by Skipping Christmas , Bleachers and Playing for Pizza . His 2009 book of short stories, Ford County , returned to the setting of his first novel. Nine of Grisham’s tales have been adapted for film and television, including The Firm , The Pelican Brief , The Client , The Rainmaker , along with his original screenplay The Gingerbread Man . The film version of Skipping Christmas was re-titled Christmas with the Kranks .

Today, John Grisham and his wife, Renee Jones, keep homes in Oxford, Mississippi and near Charlottesville, Virginia. Apart from his writing, Grisham is a generous supporter of Little League teams in Oxford and Charlottesville and has endowed a writing scholarship at the University of Mississippi.

Grisham’s nonfiction book,  The Innocent Man (2006), recounted the real-life case of Ron Williamson, a former professional baseball player sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Williamson was eventually released; his case exposed glaring inadequacies in the criminal justice system. John Grisham is also a board member of the Innocence Project, an organization that promotes the use of DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. He has spoken and written publicly against America’s high rates of incarceration and is an outspoken opponent of capital punishment.

Despite these interests and activities, Grisham has not stopped producing bestselling novels, such as The Associate and The Confession , or his 2011 comic novel,  The Litigators . In 2010, he initiated a continuing series of novels for younger readers with Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer . In addition to the baseball-themed 2012 novel,  Calico Joe , he has continued to craft highly successful thrillers, including The Racketeer , Sycamore Row , Gray Mountain , Rogue Lawyer and The Whistler.  Camino Island , published in 2017, introduced a new type of hero in Grisham’s fiction. Bookseller Bruce Cable, a dealer in rare books, is drawn into a web of intrigue following the theft of treasured manuscripts from Princeton University.

His 2018 novel The Reckoning — a combination of courtroom drama and Gothic family saga — immediately landed in the number one position on The New York Times bestseller lists for both hardcover fiction and in the combined print and e-book category.  Grisham published his 40th novel, The Guardians in October 2019, introducing a new protagonist: Cullen Post, an attorney who is also an Episcopal priest, seeking justice for the wrongly convicted. The Guardians, too, debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list.

Grisham returned to the imaginary setting of Camino Island in the 2020 novel Camino Winds , in which his bookseller hero Bruce Cable is called upon to solve the murder of a crime novelist, a crime committed under cover of a tropical storm.  Not surprisingly, the book debuted in first place on T he New York Times bestseller list.

Later that year, Grisham published A Time For Mercy, in which he revives the hero of his first novel, small-town lawyer Jake Brigance, who is called to defend a minor accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy. In October 2023, John Grisham is set to captivate readers with his highly anticipated novel, The Exchange , a sequel to the book that catapulted him to literary stardom over 30 years ago, The Firm . Grisham’s storytelling prowess shines in this new installment, where he revisits the character Mitch McDeere, now wealthy and living as an international lawyer in New York City.

“I find myself taking long walks on my farm with my wife, Renee, wondering what in the world happened,” says Grisham.

Today he one of the world’s bestselling authors, but John Grisham showed no early interest in writing. One day in 1984, three years after Grisham began practicing law in Southaven, Mississippi, he dropped by the courthouse to observe a trial. “This ten-year-old girl was testifying against a man who had raped her and left her for dead,” he says. “I never felt such emotion and human drama in my life. I became obsessed wondering what it would be like if the girl’s father killed that rapist and was put on trial. I had to write it down.”

Grisham has hardly stopped writing since then. Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill, was published in 1989 and sold a mere 5,000 copies. But his second, The Firm , the story of a law school grad recruited by a firm with mob connections, spent a spectacular 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Once Grisham started writing, he never stopped. Every year brings a new bestseller from the master of the legal thriller. Many of his works, including The Firm , The Pelican Brief , The Client and The Rainmaker have been made into successful motion pictures.  Read all over the world, his books have sold more that 300 million copies.

When did you decide to start writing?

The writing has come fairly late in life. I never dreamed of being a writer when I was a kid, even a student, even in college. In fact, I’d been practicing law for about three or four years in the early ’80s, when I decided to make a stab at writing a story that I’d been thinking about. And the story eventually became A Time to Kill.

What inspired you to begin with?

John Grisham: When I started all this, my motives were pure. I was not driven by greed or money. I had a story. It was a courtroom drama. I was doing a lot of courtroom work; I was a very young lawyer. But I was handling a lot of court-appointed criminal cases, in trial a lot. And I knew the criminal system, and I knew a lot about it. So I came up with a story about a murder trial, and some of it was based on personal experience, most of it was not. And I kept telling myself, I would like to be the lawyer who defended a father who murdered the two guys who raped his daughter. I think that would be a fascinating case. One thing led to another, and I was sort of consumed with this story. And one night I just said, “Okay. I’m going to try to capture it, see what I can do with words.” And that’s what happened.

It took three years to write it, and I was very disciplined about doing it. It was very much a hobby. By the time I finished it, I had developed a routine of writing every day. When I finished it, I went to the next book, which was The Firm. Once that was written, everything started changing. I wouldn’t use the word “accident,” but it certainly wasn’t planned. I never dreamed of it.

You found the time to write, so you must have been pretty motivated.

John Grisham: The bulk of the first two books, A Time to Kill and The Firm, those books were written over a five-year period, back-to-back, from about 1984 to about 1989. The bulk was written at five o’clock in the morning, from five ’til seven in the morning. I’d get up and go to the office that early. And again, it wasn’t any fun, but it was a habit. It got to be part of the daily routine. And I remember several times being in court at nine o’clock in the morning, really tired, because writing takes a lot out of you. It’s draining. And I would do it for an hour or two in the morning, and get ready for court, and go to court. Be standing, waiting for the judge, and be really tired.

Was there a moment in your career that really stands out as a turning point?

John Grisham: There have been some wonderful phone calls from New York. The biggest phone call yet was the first time, a truly magical moment. After a year of being turned down, my agent called one day in April of ’88 and said, “We have a publisher for A Time to Kill. It’s going to be a book.” At that point it had been turned down by 30-something publishers. Everybody had said no to it. He found a very small press in New York, and they wanted to buy it. That was a huge moment.

Another time, he called and said, “We’ve sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount.” It was totally unexpected, because at that time there was no book deal, it was just in manuscript form. Those are big moments. I don’t know if you sort of get jaded, or callous to success, but it’s still terribly exciting. It’s still hard to believe.

The Firm was published four years ago, so it’s been awfully quick. The Firm was not the first book, but it was the first book anybody read. My career is still in its infancy and it still feels brand new. Something happens every day that makes me stop and try to remember where I am and what’s happening.

Tell us about your family and your friends.

John Grisham: It’s easy to remember friends.

When A Time to Kill was published, it was an unknown author, unknown book, unknown publisher. There was no money for promotion, so I tried to sell the book myself. And I went to a lot of book stores in the Memphis, mid-South area, and a lot of them had no time, you know? They didn’t want a new author, especially one with a publisher they’d never heard of. But there were a handful who opened their doors and said, “Sure, come in. We’ll try to sell some books, and we’ll have a party, and we’ll invite all of our customers.”

And, you know, it’s hard to forget people like that. And it’s fun now. I go back every time. I’ve gone back with every book. There are five stores. I call them — they’re my home stores. These are friends of mine, and I can’t imagine publishing a book and not going back to their stores. I mean, now the book signings last for, you know, ten or 12 hours, but you know, it’s still fun. It’s tiring, but it’s only once a year. I don’t do it every day. And there are worse things in life than signing lots of copies of your own books. I’m still gratified that people show up and wait in line to get a book signed.

And, you know…

The pressure of really sudden notoriety and success, it’s good and bad. I mean, it’s something you think you’d like to have, and it’s something that’s nice. There are a lot of rewards. The good far outweighs the bad. But you catch yourself trying to remember what’s important to you, your friends and families and what you enjoyed doing years before. We have two small children, and we had a life before all this happened. And even then — we call it BF, before The Firm, that’s how we judge time — everything we did revolved around the kids, and it’s still that way. We’ve sort of regrouped as a family, and we kind of stick to ourselves, with a few friends. It makes you appreciate the friends you had, because now everybody wants to be friends. It makes you deeply appreciative of the people who are truly friends. We’ve stayed away from the success. We live in Mississippi, and in Virginia. We live in both places, but it’s country living. We try to keep it simple, and we stay away from Hollywood, New York and all those places where the attention really is.

Did you have any conception of the kind of success that you’ve come to?

John Grisham: It’s been one book at a time. A Time to Kill was published, but nobody bought it. About the time it was published, I was finished with The Firm. The Firm slowly became a bestseller when it was published. While it was getting this attention, I was writing the next book, which was The Pelican Brief.

Each book has built on the other. Then the movies came along and added a much heavier layer of fame and notoriety, and pressure. It’s just snowballed, but there’s no way I could have predicted that, because I can’t predict what’s going to happen next year with the movies and the books. I don’t have a feel for everything that’s coming.

My parents did not have the benefit of college. They didn’t get to go to college. They were from a very rural part of the Deep South, where most of my relatives were from. College to them was always a dream. For us, it was always a requirement. We knew — because they told us — we’d go to college. And they worked very hard to pay for it, and to provide it for all of five kids. And I was the first member of my family to finish college, and to get a graduate degree in law, and to start practicing law. And for the family, that was a source of immense pride. To me, that’s the American Dream, for one generation to keep building the dream for later generations.

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John Grisham Is Still Battling His Southern Demons

By David Marchese June 21, 2022

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“It was such a hard-right-wing, racist society that I grew up in. I’ve come a long way.”

By David Marchese

There are very few constants in life — and it sure feels as if the number is shrinking — but one thing readers of popular fiction can count on is that every year will bring a new John Grisham book, or two. With his latest, “Sparring Partners,” the prolific and megaselling novelist is offering his humble version of a changeup. The book, his 47th, is the 67-year-old’s first collection of novellas. It includes three separate stories, one of which features his old standby Southern-lawyer character Jake Brigance. But while his professional life has been marked by a certain steadfastness, his personal and political evolution wasn’t quite so smooth. “I’ve come a long way,” says Grisham, who was a lawyer and a politician before turning to writing. “Once I became a lawyer, most of my clients were poor people, working people, minority people who had no money. We were on one side of the street. On the other side of the street were the people with money. Real quick I realized where I stood in life and where I was going to be in life.”

With the exception of “Strawberry Moon,” the material in the new book feels to me like the kind of plots and subject matter that you normally render at full length. And, to be crass, I’ve also heard that novellas don’t sell as well as novels. So why opt for the form? Over the years, these stories keep lying around, and I realized that the birthdays are piling up and the stories are not being written. So, I said, OK, I’m going to pick out my three favorites and finish them. I’m tired of thinking about them. I emailed Stephen King and said, “You’ve done several collections of novellas; how did it work?” He said he also had a lot of stories, you’re not going to be able to write them all as novels, some don’t work as short stories, so you do something in the middle. That’s how it all came to pass. I can play around with a baseball book or a football book or short stories or a kids’ book in my spare time, but I know my readers want the legal thriller every fall.

When you know you’ve got to deliver a big new legal thriller every fall — and in between you’re often writing those other books — are you ever able to abandon an idea that isn’t working? Or do you just have to find a way to make it work? I’ve never had the situation where I wrote myself into a corner I couldn’t get out of. At the same time, with every book I reach a point late in the game where I have doubts about the story and get nervous, even frightened, about Who’s going to believe this stuff? I’m going through it right now with “The Boys From Biloxi.” My goal each year with each legal thriller is to write about 100,000 words. That’s going to produce a novel, when published, that’s about 350 pages. To me, that’s ideal. You don’t need a big thick book for a thriller. “The Boys From Biloxi” — I’m at 120,000 right now and sweating, because I have a lot left to cover to get to the end. So, yeah, those are issues that come up. But I cannot squeeze a novel out of every idea. A perfect example is the opioid crisis. It’s right down my alley because it’s tons of litigation, corporate bad behavior, all kinds of bad guys. I’ve been itching to write that book, but I haven’t been able to get my head around a story that I could do in 100,000 words. It’s just so big. Guantánamo’s another one. I’ve been collecting research for 20 years. We’ve kept prisoners down there for 15 years without charging them with any crime. There’s a lot of lawyers who spend time down there trying to correct a terrible situation. It’s also right down my alley because it’s the legal system, but again, I can’t get my head around that story.

This is a little left-field, but I was fascinated by the fact that as a young man, you held office in the Mississippi Legislature. Could the 28-year-old version of you be elected in Mississippi today? At that time I was — I’m not going to say conservative. I was a moderate Democrat. Today that person doesn’t exist in the South. If I ran today, I would hope that I would run as a progressive Democrat — and I would not be elected. I have friends who hold public office in Mississippi who had to switch from Democrat to Republican to keep their jobs. If you have the D by your name, you’re not going to be elected. It has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. Also, it ought to be against the law in any state for a 28-year-old to be elected to the state legislature. I see these guys — the guy from North Carolina?

Madison Cawthorn. Yeah. Just got beat. It shows you what happens when a 26-year-old who’s off leash gets elected. He needed to be called home. You’ve got to be at least 30 years old and have some maturity before you get that job. I didn’t do any damage in my eight years, but there’s not much of a record to brag about. I didn’t do a lot of good.

What was the most morally difficult decision you had to make as a politician or a practicing lawyer? I’ll tell you a story. A 15-year-old girl in my church got pregnant. Her parents were devastated. Strict Southern Baptist. Small town. They were terrified people were going to find out. They came to me before they went to the minister because they were talking about adoption, the laws. Abortion terrified them. The father was 15 years old, too, so getting married was out of the question. I remember thinking, These people are leaning on me way too much. I was a 27-year-old kid, one year out of law school. They think I’m wise. I’m not ready for this. The parents weren’t a whole lot older than I was — in their early 40s, I guess. They reached a point where they trusted me, and I’m thinking, I don’t want to be in this room. I finally said: “Let’s get the minister involved. You people need help big time, and I’m not giving it to you.” My point is, I realized that on the abortion issue, that was a decision to be made by that family — that girl and the parents and nobody else. Nobody else should be in the room.

Including the government? No government, no lawmaker, no judge. That’s when I began to realize what’s at stake with abortion. I’m opposed to abortion. I didn’t want her to get an abortion, because the baby was going to be healthy — and the baby did make a great gift for someone else. She was able to leave and go live with an aunt in another town, have the baby well cared for, adopt it out. She came back, the family rallied, the church rallied. Made the best of a bad situation, and somebody got a beautiful baby. But there were times when I was thinking the quickest solution would be an abortion. I didn’t say that, but it was a quandary I was in because I was getting way too much input. That had a big impact on me as a lawyer, because you realize the influence you have. The law degree is a powerful tool. You can do a lot of good things. That’s the fun part of being a lawyer, when you help people. I was not a very good lawyer.

Why not? You’ve got to be kind of tough on the business end, and I could never say no to people who were in trouble, especially people I knew in the community. When you take everything that walks in the door, you’re going to go broke. That was my downfall. At the same time, I had strong ambitions about being a skilled courtroom lawyer. That was my goal, inspired by some great old-fashioned country trial lawyers in Mississippi I knew. I was never afraid of going to court. Most lawyers are. A lot of them are afraid to try a case in front of a jury, but I thrived on that. I dreamed of being so good that people with really good cases — injury cases or wrongful-death cases or medical-malpractice cases — would come to me and I would have the chance to make some money, which I never did.

You said that you’re opposed to abortion. For religious reasons? I’ve just never been able to stomach the idea of abortion on demand or women having multiple abortions just because they get pregnant. And I’ve always thought that late-term abortion, partial-birth abortions were something that we should not tolerate because the fetus is viable. I’ve always been turned off by that notion of abortion. I guess it’s probably religious grounds. But at the same time you don’t know what you’re going to do until you’re in that situation. That’s when it becomes a matter of choice.

What political positions did you hold when you were 28 that you don’t hold now? Death penalty, for sure.

You used to believe in it? Big time. I’m in favor of tougher gun control. I am much more suspicious of the police and prosecutors because I’ve seen so many wrongful convictions. Also, race relations: I grew up in the Jim Crow South. A very segregated, racist society was almost in my DNA. It’s a long struggle to overcome that and to look back at the way I was raised and not be resentful toward my parents and other people who helped raise me for their extreme racism. It was such a hard right-wing, racist society that I grew up in. The Baptist Church was that way too back then. I’ve come a long way. I have a lot of friends and even kinfolk who never tried to move beyond the racism. But I try every day. It’s been an ongoing, gradual transformation. My wife was another factor, because she grew up in North Carolina, and it was not as hard-core racist as Mississippi. She and her parents were much more tolerant. So she had a big influence on me. You know, we’re all tribalists. We all want to be around our people or believe in our people, and it’s often too hard to get beyond that. It’s still a struggle for me.

Has your sense of the South as a literary setting changed? To my mind, the open resurgence of racist violence makes a book like “A Time to Kill” read even more disturbingly today than it did when I first read it in the mid-90s. It’s changed in many ways. That story is based on an actual assault that happened in the 1970s in a small town not too far from where I lived and went to law school. When I wrote that story, I was 30 years old and had never written before. I can’t tell you there was a lot of careful forethought with “A Time to Kill.” I didn’t think about the portrayal of Southern Blacks and Southern whites in a small town. That was just my world. At the same period of time, in 1988, I was back from my second term at the Legislature. We had a progressive young governor, a progressive young House speaker. We thought finally Mississippi could change things. We were on the cusp of this progressive revolution. We believed it. Thirty-four years later, it’s astonishing how far backward the state has gone. The politics there are very displeasing to me.

Let me shift gears: This could be apocryphal, but I heard that you and Michael Crichton used to have some one-upmanship over money. Each of you wanted to be paid a dollar more than the other guy. Is that true? In the 1990s, for about five years in a row, my agent would take my latest manuscript — “Pelican Brief,” “The Client,” “The Chamber,” “The Rainmaker” — to Hollywood, get the studios in a room and have an auction. And when they paid, they paid millions . I don’t know what was actually said because I wasn’t there, but it was like, “Crichton got this amount; we want more.” It was back and forth. We were gaming the system big time. It was working beautifully — until it stopped. I sold the film rights to “The Runaway Jury” in 1996 to New Regency for a record amount. I can’t get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then Hollywood changed. I don’t understand that world. Nobody understands that world. There’s no rules. We learned years ago, do not believe a word until they start filming. “Runaway Jury” was actually the last big contract I got. I helped write the script, which was a huge mistake. Joel Schumacher was the director. We had Sean Connery, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton ready to start filming. It was a done deal, and Joel Schumacher jumped off the bus. The whole cast walked away. It took years to make that movie.

Why was it a mistake to work on the script? I’m not a screenwriter. It’s not something I enjoy doing. One of the most frustrating parts is the teamwork. You get notes from people who don’t have a clue, who do not understand the basics of storytelling. You wonder if they even make movies. The worst note I got — it’s a great story. In 1993, ’94, somewhere in there, “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client” came out in the span of about 12 months. All three books were at the top of the list, along with “A Time to Kill,” which had been rediscovered. Things were hopping. I was finishing “The Chamber,” and this was a stupid thing we did: A big-time Hollywood guy said, “OK, we want to buy your next book right now sight unseen.” I sent the manuscript, what I had, and this studio honcho read the first draft of an incomplete manuscript and wasn’t too crazy about it. Which really pissed me off. Suddenly this guy’s a literary critic? He sent a faxed note, I believe, to my agent at the time and said, “We can’t buy this book for a movie unless Grisham will promise three love scenes and a happy ending.” [Laughs.] If I ever write a Hollywood tell-all, that’s the title of my book: “Three Love Scenes and a Happy Ending.”

Do you think about your critical legacy as a writer? When you get started in the business and you have some success, like I did with “The Firm,” you want to be taken seriously as a writer, but you have to be honest with yourself. You can’t sell books and be loved by critics. It’s not going to happen. There are very few literary authors who sell a lot of books. The best seller for a literary novel is 25,000 copies. Fifty max. If you do sell a lot of books, you’re dismissed by critics. So I decided a long time ago, I’ll take the money and run. You talk about legacy? I don’t care. I’m going to be dead and gone.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the Talk columnist.

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What is certain in life death, taxes — and a new book by john grisham.

Andrew Limbong

John Grisham at his office in Charlottesville, Va. His new book is a sequel to The Firm , the book that turned him into a star. Donald Johnson/The New York Times/Doubleday hide caption

John Grisham at his office in Charlottesville, Va. His new book is a sequel to The Firm , the book that turned him into a star.

Just going by numbers alone, it's undeniable that John Grisham is a statesman of American letters. Since the beginning of his career, his goal has been focused on output.

"One smart decision I made way back then was to hurry up and write," he said in an interview with NPR. He's published 49 books, and has sold more than 400 million copies, according to his publicist. He's been in the game for more than three decades now.

And in this tenured position in the world of books, he's adjacent to the existential crises facing books today. He's part of a big lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI for copyright infringement (he said he's not allowed to comment on it). People often ask him about his stance on books being pulled from schools and library shelves (he said it is "ridiculous" but doesn't keep a close eye on the news).

Mostly, though, he'd rather be writing.

He's now out with his latest, The Exchange . It's a sequel to 1991's The Firm , which was the book that turned Grisham into a writing star. When I asked him why, after all this time, is he revisiting The Firm, he simply said: "Well, we're always trying to angle a way to sell more books."

The Firm was first published when Grisham was juggling working as a lawyer and being a member of the state legislature in Mississippi. He'd start his days early and write in the mornings. His first book, A Time To Kill , didn't do so well — at first, at least. Not until after he wrote his follow up, The Firm , which was an immediate success. "It was overnight," he said. "Terribly exciting."

The book is about a young hotshot lawyer named Mitch McDeere. He isn't a criminal defense attorney, or a white collar prosecutor, or anything exciting like that. He's a tax lawyer. And he gets recruited into a secret law firm in Memphis that, surprise, surprise, is doing shady business with shady people, and Mitch finds himself caught between the mob and the FBI.

John Grisham and his wife Renee in 2004. "We kept our feet on the ground and we didn't change," said Grisham of finding fame. Michael Springer/Getty Images hide caption

John Grisham and his wife Renee in 2004. "We kept our feet on the ground and we didn't change," said Grisham of finding fame.

The immediate bestseller was pulpy and breezy enough that it was prime material for a 1993 movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise. The movie was a hit, too, becoming the highest grossing R rated film that year . Suddenly, Grisham's work was a hot commodity in Hollywood: The Pelican Brief got turned into a movie. As did The Client . Then his first book, A Time To Kill .

"In the early 90s, things were really chaotic, but also a whole lot of fun. We were having a ball," he said of himself and his wife, Renee Grisham. But they also had their eyes towards the future — and on the cyclical nature of fame.

"We always said to each other, look, everything goes in cycles and nobody stays on top forever," he said. "Nothing is going to last forever. And so one of these days, this incredible journey is going to be over."

Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission

Even as the machinations of Hollywood taste changed, and options for his books kept going nowhere, Grisham kept hurrying up and writing. The Exchange takes place 15 years after The Firm . Mitch and his wife Abby live in New York City with their two children. It's a bigger globe trotting book — the main legal concern is over a fictional bridge in Libya that Col. Muammar Gaddafi wants built.

Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

Not my job: legal thriller author john grisham gets quizzed on (men's) briefs.

But before the main thrust of the narrative, there's a prelude of sorts that involves Mitch going back to Memphis to do some pro bono work involving a man on death row. Before he can even get started on the case, the man dies — supposedly by suicide. We never really come back to this storyline in the book but it serves multiple functions: It lets the reader revisit some of the story beats of the first book, but it also touches on the core of what drives so much of Grisham's work — injustice.

In 2006, Grisham wrote his first non-fiction book called The Innocent Man , about a wrongfully convicted man on death row. Since then, he's taken up the cause of wrongful convictions. He's on the boards The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which helps get wrongfully convicted people out of prison. He is working on another book now, unsurprisingly. But it's a non-fiction collection about people spending decades in prison for someone else's crimes. "It happens all the time," he said.

Since the beginning of his career until now, not much has changed about his lifestyle, his writing process, or his demeanor. But what has shifted has been his faith in the jury system.

"We're supposed to trust the police and the prosecutors. We believe in those people, the judges. That's the system," he said. "And we want to believe that it always works and it doesn't.

Meghan Collins Sullivan edited the radio and digital versions of this story.

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A Conversation with John Grisham

BY DAVID MAGEE

John Grisham’s heart was in the right place. Give him that.

“I’m not going to let this (success) change me,” he said.

The year was 1992, and we were having a quiet conversation in an office building he owned just off the Oxford Square. Grisham’s third novel, “The Pelican Brief,” was about to be released and he was still adjusting to a new normal after his first blockbuster hit, “The Firm,” sat near the top of the bestseller list throughout the year before.

Grisham had just changed his home phone number, he told me, making the new one unlisted, in hopes of avoiding the burgeoning calls summoned by his head-turning success. A few years before he was a small-town lawyer in North Mississippi barely able to pay the rent—happy for most any call.

On this day, he was still for a fleeting moment in a strange space between local resident teaching a Sunday school class at church and a famous person having to unlist his phone number. Already wealthier and more recognizable, Grisham could still walk the streets of Oxford in his limited spare time, stopping into Square Books to sign copies, or by Larson’s for milk and sticks of butter.

Oxford, he hoped, was somewhat of a safe zone because it had “been done before” in Faulkner’s town—the monumental success of a local writer. But Grisham was beginning to worry that his ability to walk the streets or stop by the local grocery store would soon be taken since all indications were that “The Pelican Brief” was going to be another hit at the same time “The Firm” was on its way to Hollywood.

There’s also the fact that Oxford didn’t do Faulkner the way it was doing Grisham. Faulkner was the “town weirdo”—words Grisham once used to describe how the city viewed the late Nobel Prize winner.

“(Faulkner) was a heavy drinker in a dry county, a Baptist county,” Grisham once told a reporter. “And he wrote stuff that nobody read down there. He never fit in down there. The town wasn’t proud of him.”

Oxford felt decidedly different about Grisham, and the per capita ownership of hardback copies of The Firm was higher than Ole Miss football season ticket holders with residents who weren’t avid readers having copies on bookshelves otherwise adorned with family photographs and knick-knacks.

We were sitting feet apart during this conversation, surrounded by dozens of boxes containing copies of his latest book Grisham had to sign for various stakeholders. The boxes crowded the room, likely totaling more than the entire print run of his first book, “A Time to Kill” (1989). One got the feeling that quiet conversations like the one we were having, talking about family members and sharing stories about friends, including the late Oxford interior designer Tim Hargrove, would end with the beginning of his upcoming book tour.

“(Success) hasn’t become a real burden yet,” Grisham told me, “but I do worry a little.”

He could see it coming but didn’t want to admit it, as if holding out hope was the right thing to do. But already friends, and friends of friends, wanted to tell him about books they had written, or hoped to write. Yes, they too had a legal thriller that was sure to be a hit.

“What’s the name of your editor?” they would ask, or, “Can you tell me the name of your agent?”

Meanwhile, Grisham was concentrating on the plot for novels four, five, six and beyond.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “The ideas are popping. I’ve got a lot more.”

The key, he said, was not letting the distractions – people – get in the way. Otherwise, he suggested, he could write dozens of books.

Grisham talked about Oxford passionately as his chosen home, explaining the reasons he and wife Renee had moved to the community and built a home on a farm just beyond the city’s limits a couple of years before using a Southern Living blueprint and proceeds from the $600,000 film rights deal he got for “The Firm.” He suggested the town felt smaller with every book sold, well-intentioned distractions creeping in closer.

Grisham said he still “liked going to the Rotary Club to speak and…visiting the local schools” but teaching Sunday school or walking the  Square for leisure wasn’t as easy anymore.

“It’s a struggle,” Grisham said, regarding his evaporating privacy. “I want to be read. I don’t want to be a celebrity.”

We rarely get exactly what we want, and for Grisham being read meant celebrity status – the two went hand-in-hand. Just weeks after our visit, “The Pelican Brief” was released, reaching global bestseller status with a Hollywood deal as what little bit of local life that Grisham had left slipped away.

I didn’t see much of John the rest of that year, nor did most people in Oxford. His next book, The Client, was another blockbuster bestseller with another Hollywood deal. Suffering the fate he dreaded, Grisham all but went underground in Oxford, slipping out only to the youth baseball park, to Ole Miss, or to Square Books. The office he purchased and hoped to keep at an old church downtown was inhabited on most days by his secretary, Penny, whose primary charge was to handle everybody who wanted some of his time so he could write and manage business affairs.

John and Renee funded the Grisham Writer-in-Residence program at Ole Miss (which has recruited stalwarts including Tom Franklin), and he kept ties with Mississippi State (where he attended undergraduate school). But he had to avoid community more than he could embrace it. And by the time “The Rainmaker” was released in 1995, he and Renee were spending most of their time at a home purchased in Charlottesville, Virginia, the year before.

“We didn’t know anyone here,” Grisham recently told a Charlottesville reporter. “That was part of the appeal. We just wanted a place to hide.”

Oxonians could take offense if they didn’t know better. But it wasn’t a dig at the town, or Grisham’s home state of Mississippi. Hardly. You know the saying, “you can take the man out of Mississippi, but you can never take the Mississippi out of the man.” Well, that’s John Grisham. He and family may have moved to Virginia, but his influence here remained significant, even if from afar.

And at opportune moments, to visit family or for the funeral of a friend, Grisham quickly found his way back home. When Willie Morris passed away in 1999, for instance, Grisham joined more than 400 members of the state’s cultural elite gathered to pay respects. Never mind that he arrived here on a personal jet.

“How was John?” I asked Jim Dees, who attended the funeral and had drinks with the noteworthies including Grisham, reminiscing about Willie’s greatness and friendship after he was memorialized.

“He looked like a million bucks,” Dees said.

“I mean, really,” Dees said. “He looked like a million bucks. He was dressed in the finest suit, one of those things from France. He was fit, rested. Not like the rest of us.”

In other words, Grisham had changed, despite his fears, but for the better.

Dees said Grisham still held a commanding presence among the writers and dignitaries—a respect they paid to him at the same time they all paid respect to a fallen friend. It was as if they still considered John one of them.

He just had another zip code. And even though he and his family moved, Grisham still made an impact on this community and this state.

He always considered Square Books his home bookstore, maintaining ties and signings until he no longer toured. He and Renee remained actively involved in the Grisham Writer-in-Residence program at Ole Miss, shaping the emerging literary scene in Oxford during the late 1990s and 2000s.

They donated that church he bought as an office—the old African-American Burns church—to the Oxford-Lafayette County Heritage Foundation, and the building now stands as a centerpiece of African-American heritage in the community. The Grishams donated heavily to the Innocence Project, including dollars in Mississippi, and they contributed $5 million to aid Mississippians in relief from devastating Hurricane Katrina, plus many other contributions that the couldn’t kept private.

That’s probably why Grisham came up in a conversation this spring on the Square. It was a Friday night, with thousands in every direction. The lights in Square Books burned bright, and shoppers perused the stock while restaurants and bars nearby overflowed with storytelling. It’s been 25 years since Grisham and I had our lengthy conversation about everything important in life and more than 20 years since he moved from town, yet he still carried weight in the conversation.

“People don’t know what all this (Grisham) has done for Oxford,” a mutual friend and longtime Oxford resident told me recently, pointing to massive crowds gathered on the Square. “He had something to do with this.”

No argument here, just as Oxford likely had something to do with Grisham’s success – the literary town, home to bestselling author had a nice ring in the early days of it all. It’s just that this story took a different twist than the one Grisham envisioned when moving here after getting the big check for The Firm film rights.

He wanted to live in Oxford and be a writer, not a celebrity. And he tried to make it work. Really, he did. But he couldn’t stop the change.

Now, we have plenty of other writers, but Grisham is our biggest celebrity. He just happens to live in Charlottesville.

DAVID MAGEE   has written a dozen books, including “The Education of Mr. Mayfield.” He is president and publisher of Oxford Newsmedia. 

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John Grisham (1955–)

John Grisham is an internationally known bestselling author of legal thrillers and of one fictionalized account of his childhood in Arkansas, A Painted House . Many of his books have been made into popular Hollywood movies.

John Grisham was born in Jonesboro (Craighead County) on February 8, 1955, to John Grisham and Wanda Skidmore Grisham. At the time, his parents were helping the extended family on the cotton farm near Black Oak (Craighead County) . When Grisham was four years old, the family began following his father’s construction jobs, including spending three years in Parkin (Cross County) , before eventually settling in Southaven, Mississippi, though he and his four siblings came to the Black Oak farm to spend the summers with their grandparents. While much of his life has been spent outside of Arkansas, he has strong ties to northeast Arkansas. Grisham’s grandfather owned Skidmore Piano Store in Blytheville (Mississippi County) , and many of his relatives live in northeast Arkansas today.

Grisham loved playing baseball and followed the St. Louis Cardinals, often listening to the games on the radio with the family when the farm chores were done. He attended Northwest Junior College in Senatobia, Mississippi, and Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, to play college baseball. At Mississippi State University, he became a serious student, graduating with a BS in accounting in 1977. Grisham enrolled in law school at the University of Mississippi to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to criminal law. Shortly after graduation from law school, Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981. They have two children, Ty and Shea, and live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Oxford, Mississippi.

Grisham was admitted to the state bar in Mississippi in 1981 and practiced in Southaven until 1990. He served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from January 1984 until September 1990.

While serving in the Mississippi House, he observed a trial in the De Soto County Courthouse that changed his life. He heard the testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim. He began exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had killed her assailants. With the trial for the storyline and Steinbeck’s clear, clean writing style as a model, Grisham wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill . Most of the writing was done before going to the office and during courtroom recesses. Wynwood Press published A Time to Kill in 1988. It was a small printing, 5,000 copies, and received little attention beyond the mid-South.

Grisham began writing his second novel, The Firm , the film rights to which were purchased by Paramount Pictures in 1990, before it was even published. Doubleday published The Firm in February of 1991, and it moved to the No. 12 spot on the New York Times bestseller list by March 17.

The Firm was the beginning of Grisham’s journey to become the all-time bestselling novelist in the United States. Since The Firm , Grisham has written a novel a year and each has been a longtime feature on the bestseller lists. There are more than 60 million John Grisham books in print worldwide. They have been translated into twenty-nine languages. Doubleday and its parent company, Bartlesmann, carefully orchestrate a logistical plan to make millions of copies of the new book available worldwide on the same day. Many of his books have been made into successful movies, including A Time to Kill , The Pelican Brief , The Client , The Chamber , The Rainmaker , The Runaway Jury , The Street Lawyer , and Skipping Christmas .

In spite of Grisham’s success and fame, he has remained loyal to his roots, early friends, and supporters. His bestseller, A Painted House , published in book form in 2001, is a fictionalized account of his early days on a cotton farm. Hallmark turned the novel into one of its made-for-television movies, filming in and around Lepanto (Poinsett County) ; the farmhouse from the set is on display there. The April 14, 2003, world premiere of the movie at Arkansas State University ’s Fowler Center included a dinner that raised $170,000 in endowment funds for the Heritage Studies PhD program. In 2001, the Arkansas Library Association presented Grisham and A Painted House the Arkansiana Award, recognizing authors and books that represent a significant contribution to Arkansas heritage and culture.

In 1994, Grisham rescued the Oxford American , a financially struggling magazine devoted to covering all things Southern, through a significant investment of money. He also published A Painted House serially in that magazine in 2000, then based in Oxford, Mississippi. Although Grisham is no longer associated with it, Oxford American lives on and is published in partnership with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County) .

In 2006, Grisham published his first non-fiction work, The Innocent Man: Murder and Justice in a Small Town . The book centers upon the murder trial of Ronald Williamson and Dennis Fritz of Oklahoma, a trial which resulted in death sentences for them both until DNA evidence cleared their names after eleven years on death row.

He and his wife also established the Rebuild the Coast Fund, raising $8.8 million for storm victims of Hurricane Katrina .

In 2009, Grisham published his first short-story collection, Ford County . In 2010, Grisham published his first book for younger readers, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer ; five others in the series have since been published. Grisham continues to average about one published novel each year.

In September 2023, Grisham joined Jodi Picoult, George R. R. Martin, and other popular authors to sue OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” part of a movement toward legal action by writers contending that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without their permission.

For additional information: Best, Nancy, ed. Readings on John Grisham . San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2003.

Erisman, Fred. “John Grisham’s Ford County: Yoknapatawpha County Updated.” Journal of American Culture 43 (June 2020): 145–155.

Hughes, Libby. The John Grisham Story: From Baseball to Bestsellers . Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Inc., 2004.

Ishizuka, Kathy. John Grisham: Best-Selling Author . Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2003.

John Grisham. https://www.jgrisham.com/ (accessed September 21, 2023).

Sabin, Warwick. “John Grisham: Author.” Arkansas Times , December 14, 2006. Online at https://arktimes.com/general/top-stories/2006/12/14/john-grisham-author (accessed July 5, 2019).

Weaver, Robyn. John Grisham . San Diego: Lucent Books, 1999.

Mary Gay Shipley That Bookstore in Blytheville

My mother Muriel Lee grew up in Black Oak, Arkansas. My grandfather Jack Hubble ran Cisco store. My mother’s best friend was Lucille Bell (“Pop’s”) daughter, which was left out of A Painted House . My grandfather was Granville Roberts, constable of Black Oak (because he couldn’t make a living farming cotton) during that time. Later moving to Lonoke Arkansas. This is just to say how many memorable tears and laughter Grisham’s work brought. Thank you, Cheryl R. Anderson, granddaughter of Jack and Chattie Hubble

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John Grisham | Biography, Books & Law Career

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Table of Contents

John grisham: author and lawyer, novels by john grisham, short stories by john grisham, children's books by john grisham, non-fiction books by john grisham, movies based on john grisham books, lesson summary, does grisham still practice law.

John Grisham does not practice law anymore. He stopped serving as a lawyer in 1990 after he reached success through his second novel and began writing full-time. However, in 1996, he briefly returned to the world of law when he decided to defend a man who was killed in a railroad incident.

What is the publication order of John Grisham's books?

John Grisham's books were written in the following publication order:

• A Time to Kill
• The Pelican Brief
• The Chamber
• The Rainmaker
• The Runaway Jury
• The Partner
• The Street Lawyer
• The Testament
• The Brethren
• A Painted House
• Skipping Christmas
• The Summons
• The King of Torts
• The Last Juror
• The Innocent Man
• Playing for Pizza
• The Associate
• Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer
• The Confession
• Theodore Boone: The Abduction
• The Litigators
• Theodore Boone: The Accused
• The Racketeer
• Theodore Boone: The Activist
• Sycamore Row
• Gray Mountain

Theodore Boone: The Fugitive

Rogue Lawyer

Theodore Boone: The Scandal

The Whistler

Camino Island

The Rooster Bar

The Reckoning

The Guardians

Camino Winds

A Time for Mercy

The Judge's List

What is John Grisham's most popular book?

John Grisham's most popular book is A Time to Kill from 1989. This is also the first book that he ever published. The story follows Jake Brigance, a new lawyer taking on a big case. After a young girl is raped, her father kills her rapists. Jake defends her father in court, and the story details the fight for his client's life. Since publishing A Time to Kill, Grisham has written three other books about Jake Brigance.

What is John Grisham's new book about?

John Grisham's most recent book is entitled The Judge's List, and it was published in October of 2021. The story is a sequel to his 2016 novel, The Whistler. It follows Lacy Stoltz three years after the events of the Whistler. Lacy works for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct and takes on a case that has remained unsolved for 20 years. She begins to grow interested in a suspect, but the man is too intelligent to be so easily arrested. She soon realizes that he is a judge under her jurisdiction, and the novel follows her as she tries to catch the man without becoming his next victim.

What is John Grisham famous for?

John Grisham is a bestselling American author best know for his legal thrillers. Before he started writing, he worked as a lawyer, and this career helped inspire the plots of his many novels. Grisham has published over 40 novels since 1989. He releases at least one new book each year.

John Grisham is a prolific American author best known for his legal thrillers. Legal thrillers are a subset of crime fiction . The protagonist of his books is usually a lawyer, and the legal system is a prominent part of his novels . Some of his most famous works are A Time to Kill , The Firm , and The Client . These novels, among many others, were later adapted into movies . Grisham has published over 40 books, and he continues to release new novels every year.

Grisham's Early Life

John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on February 8, 1955. A few years after Grisham was born, his parents, John Grisham and Wanda Skidmore Grisham started working on a cotton farm with their other family members. Eventually, Grisham and his family began travelling around the Southern United States. A few years later, they permanently moved to Southaven, Mississippi, which is where Grisham spent most of his childhood.

During his family's travels, Grisham's mother often took him to libraries, where he enjoyed checking out various books. These trips sparked his love for reading, though Grisham did not always strive to be an author. As a child, he was a big fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, and he had a childhood dream of becoming a baseball player. Still, his parents valued education, so they encouraged him to pursue college.

During his first two years of college, he showed little to no interest in his schoolwork. He attended three different schools before he eventually gave up his baseball dreams and settled down to earn his degree in law.

Grisham as a Lawyer

Once Grisham decided against a baseball career, he began to study accounting in college with hopes of working as a tax lawyer. However, he quickly gained an interest in criminal justice and started to study criminal law. Grisham graduated in 1981 and began working as a lawyer at his own private practice, staying in Southaven to practice law until 1990. He enjoyed meeting his clients, and he was passionate about helping them. His experiences working with low-income families and individuals pushed him to run for office, and he was elected to serve as a Democratic Mississippi State Representative. He held this position from 1984 to 1989.

After practicing law for nearly a decade, Grisham started to realize that he did not enjoy his job as much as he once did. Still, all the experiences he had while working as a lawyer helped his imagination flourish, thus leading him to a career in writing.

Grisham Becoming A Writer

Grisham found that he had little time in his schedule to dedicate to writing, so he woke up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to write for an hour before he started his workday. It took him three years to complete his first novel.

Grisham's law career helped inspire his book, A Time to Kill . As a lawyer, he witnessed the trial of a 12-year-old girl who was raped, and he started to think about how her trial might have changed if the girl's father had murdered her assailant. Grisham set his novel in Mississippi, and the protagonist was a new lawyer taking on a big case. These plot elements were based on his own experience, and even though Grisham no longer enjoyed practicing law, he still used his first novel to express his ambitions for the career. Grisham also wondered what it would be like to work on a case like the one in his story.

Although Grisham's novel eventually became a success, he struggled to publish the book initially. Twenty-eight publishers rejected his story before he finally found a small publishing house that agreed to give him a chance. He published A Time to Kill in June of 1989, but he only sold about 5,000 copies of the book. Still, that did not stop him from pursuing his writing dreams.

Shortly after publishing A Time to Kill , Grisham started writing his second novel, The Firm . A larger publishing company decided to pick up his second book this time. Additionally, he sold the film rights to the story before the book was even published. The Firm launched his career as a full-time writer. The success of his second book drove him to quit law and pursue writing instead. In 1990, he closed his practice and moved to Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and children so he could spend more time writing.

John Grisham Today

Since writing his first two novels, Grisham has published over 40 books. In 2021, he released two novels: Sooley and The Judge's List , both of which made the New York Times Best Sellers list. Grisham and his wife still live in Mississippi. Grisham never left behind his love for baseball, as he still supports the Little League teams in Oxford, and he currently serves as the local Little League commissioner. Grisham also contributes to charity in his free time. He and his wife have developed their own foundation entitled The Oakwood Foundation Charitable Trust, and they support a multitude of charitable causes through their foundation. Grisham is set to publish his next book, The Flames of Hope , in April of 2022.

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Grisham typically writes legal thrillers, many of which have gone on to become bestselling books. Most of the protagonists in his novels are lawyers, and the conflicts in his stories typically occur due to issues within the court system. Since he writes thrillers, Grisham's books contain twists and turns that aim to keep the reader interested. One of his most popular books, The Firm , follows Mitch McDeere, a young lawyer signed with a top law firm. However, he quickly learns that the distinguished firm is not as prestigious as it seems, and he begins to uncover their malicious motives. Another one of his most popular novels is called The Client , and it follows two young brothers who learn the answer to the most mysterious crime in the country. After a lawyer explains the details of a horrific murder to the boys, he shoots himself and leaves them to deal with the repercussions of what he knew. The story primarily focuses on one of the boys as he faces the pressure to confess what he knows and the threat of a mob killer who wants to cover up his crime. Grisham's other popular novels include the following: The Pelican Brief , The Runaway Jury , The Rainmaker , The Chamber , and The Partner .

Grisham occasionally steps away from writing thrillers to explore other genres. A Painted House is a story that he based on his childhood in Arkansas, and it illustrates his life on the cotton farm. He has also published baseball-related books, including Calico Joe , which is a fictional novel that follows the life of a talented professional baseball player. He also has two novels about football: Bleachers and Playing for Pizza . In 2021, he published Sooley , his first basketball novel that centers around a South Sudanese basketball player who travels to the United States with his team. He has also ventured into holiday writing, and in 2001 he published a Christmas book entitled Skipping Christmas . This story is all about Luther and Nora Krank, who decide not to celebrate Christmas and instead go on a cruise during the holiday, but they quickly realize that their idea is not as easy to execute as it seems.

Grisham mostly writes longer novels, but his short stories allow him to delve into new genres and explore different literary themes. His short stories include the following:

• Ford County (short story collection)
• Witness to Trial

His first short story collection, Ford County , came out in 2009 and is set in Ford County, Mississippi, the same location as his first novel, A Time to Kill . All the stories in the collection take place in Ford County and follow a unique and diverse cast of characters. This collection has themes of vengeance, justice, and grief.

Another one of his short stories is entitled "The Tumor," and it sheds light on the focused ultrasound process, a shift away from his usual legal writing. This story has a strong theme of medical awareness.

"Partners" is a prequel to Grisham's book, A Rogue Lawyer. The story follows a lawyer who dares to defend people that other lawyers will not and has themes of isolation and friendship.

"Witness to a Trial" is also a prequel, and this story is set before the events of The Whistler. The story features a judge, defence attorney, prosecutor, innocent man, and killer in the courtroom. The book balances themes of good versus evil.

Grisham has stated that he wants to write stories for children who do not underestimate their intelligence or ability to handle sensitive topics. He has a series of legal thrillers for children about a child lawyer named Theodore Boone. In 2010, he published the first book in this series which he called Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer . The book follows a 13-year-old boy who is obsessed with the world of law. His parents have their own law firm, and he has a dedicated office in their firm so he can help his friends solve their legal problems. Despite the intended audience for the story, Grisham does not hold back from intense topics in the novel. In the first book, a person from Theodore's town is murdered, and Theodore finds himself involved in the murder trial. In 2019, Grisham published The Accomplice , the most recent book in the Theodore Boone series.

Grisham has authored non-fiction literature in addition to his fictional pieces. His first and only non-fiction novel , The Innocent Man , is a true-crime novel that he released in 2006. The book details the story of Ron Williamson, a talented baseball player who was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death for his supposed crime. Grisham exposes the problems that occurred during Williamson's trial, and he explains how lawyers helped clear Williamson's name 11 years after his trial.

Due to his success, many of Grisham's books have been adapted into movies. The Firm was his first movie adaptation by director Sydney Pollack, and the film featured Tom Cruise as the protagonist. It was released in 1993, shortly after the novel of the same name. The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and many still consider it to be the best adaptation of Grisham's stories.

Later, Joel Schumacher, who also directed The Client , adapted Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, into a movie that stars Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, and Samuel L. Jackson. This film also received high praise, especially due to the actors involved in the movie. McConaughey is in talks to reprise his role from this film in the movie adaptation of A Time for Mercy .

Pelican Brief , Runaway Jury , and The Rainmaker are just a few more films based on Grisham's bestselling novels.

John Grisham is a popular author who has written over 40 books . Although he had a childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player, he ultimately started a law career instead. He quit law after his second novel reached success. He is best known for his legal thrillers , some of which include A Time to Kill , The Firm , and The Client . The Firm is about a new lawyer who works for a law firm full of secrets. In The Firm, a young lawyer works for a seemingly perfect law firm that is not exactly how it appears. After initially being rejected by numerous publishers, Grisham published his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1988. Many of his novels have been adapted into successful movies. As an adult, he is a local Little League baseball team commissioner. He releases new books each year, and he remains one of the most prolific and well-known American authors.

John Grisham grew up in the Deep South. He was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955, but he traveled throughout the South as child because his father was a cotton farmer and traveling construction worker. While they traveled from town to town, they'd stop at the local libraries and check out books. His mother didn't believe in television, but she loved to read and encouraged her son to do it as well. While Grisham enjoyed reading as a kid, he never thought about writing. His dream was to play professional baseball.

His parents insisted he go to college, however. So he drifted half-heartedly through three different schools, spending more time partying than studying, dreaming of playing ball, until one day he had an epiphany. He realized that he wasn't good enough at baseball to play professionally, and that it was 'time to grow up.' One thing Grisham doesn't lack is a work ethic, so once he realized what he needed to do, he got to it. He got a degree in accounting and then pursued law. Once he graduated in 1981, he opened his own legal practice. His specialization was personal injury litigation and criminal defense. Litigation is the process of taking legal action, or bringing a case to court. A couple years later, in 1983, Grisham was also elected to the state House of Representatives.

Grisham's Law Practice

As a lawyer, Grisham's passion was representing people who didn't necessarily have much money, but who needed help. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian , he said:

I represented real people, poor people, who often couldn't afford to pay a lawyer, but still had problems. Directly across the street from my office were insurance companies, banks and big corporations. It was a very clear line between us, and I learned very quickly who my friends were.

While Grisham liked helping people, he didn't actually enjoy the daily grind of being a lawyer. And so one day when his imagination led him to question what would happen if the father of one of the victims he knew from the courtroom killed her attackers, he decided to explore the scenario by writing a book about it.

Grisham's Writing Career

The thing is, being a lawyer isn't exactly a cushy job. And so to make time to write the novel, Grisham had to get up at 5:00 each morning so he could write for a couple of hours before getting to his law work. The book he was working on was called A Time to Kill. You might recognize that title, as it eventually became a best-selling novel and movie. However, that success actually came years later. When Grisham first finished the novel, it was rejected by 28 publishers. Eventually, in 1988, a small publisher took a chance on the book, but it only sold a few thousand copies at the time.

Fortunately for Grisham's career - and for his millions of fans - Grisham didn't quit after writing that first novel. In fact, as soon as that book was done, he immediately began working on another novel. This second novel also drew on his experience as a lawyer. This novel, called The Firm , is about a young, talented lawyer who is lured to a law firm that seems perfect on the outside, but that actually has a very dark side to it. Unlike A Time to Kill , The Firm quickly became a huge success. It sold over seven million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for forty-seven weeks, and was turned into a very popular movie starring Tom Cruise.

The success of The Firm allowed Grisham to stop practicing law (although years later he returned to defend a single client; this was to fulfill a commitment he'd made). He didn't stop writing, though. In fact, one of the remarkable things about Grisham's career as a writer is the large number of excellent books he's written. He published a book every year for many years in a row, and most of those books have gone on to become best-sellers. See the section below to learn more about the books and short stories that he's written.

To this day, Grisham continues to write. He's also found a way to incorporate his old love of baseball in his life: he's a Little League commissioner and has six baseball fields on his land where local teams can play. He lives with his wife, Renee, and by all appearances, we can expect many more great stories from him!

Grisham's popular books include:

Short Stories

Grisham published his first collection of short stories, called Ford County , in 2009. The title of the book is the name of the county where all of the stories in the collection take place Ford County is also where his first novel, A Time to Kill , takes place. Though these stories received mixed reviews, the work shows that Grisham is a writer who isn't afraid to try to new things.

John Grisham is a talented writer with a dedicated work ethic. After giving up his childhood dream of playing baseball, and then spending years practicing as a lawyer, he began writing novels. Many of his novels draw on his experience as a lawyer. He's written many best-sellers, and continues to this day to write and publish novels that millions of people look forward to and read every year.

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John Grisham Books In Order

Publication order of jake brigance books.

Publication Order of Mitch McDeere Books

Publication Order of Theodore Boone Books

Publication Order of Camino Island Books

Publication Order of Rogue Lawyer Books

Publication Order of The Whistler Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

John Grisham Biography:

The American south has long been a point of interest to historians as it was the place where slavery once boomed and racisim ran rampant. Although the land has been a place of much turmoil, some positive things have arisen for it, as it was in Jonesboro, Arkansas that John Grisham was born. He arrived in the world on February 8, 1955, when cotton was still a major product of the south. His father happened to be a cotton farmer at the time.

However, the family began to move around to different areas, still south of the Mason-Dixon Line, while Grisham was in his youth. They settled down again in Southaven, Mississippi and that is where the young John Grisham became determined to be a baseball player for his profession. However, his mother had different aspirations for her son and began grooming him for college, although she herself had never received a formal education.

Her efforts did prove fruitful, as John Grisham successfully attended and graduated from Mississippi State University and later law school, graduating from Ole Miss. After having childhood desire to become a MLB player, settling on a legal career was not a simple thing for John Grisham. He had changed majors three times while in college and switched jobs several times during his teenage and young adult years.

As a lawyer, Grisham also made changes, switching from being a tax lawyer to trial lawyer, stating a dislike for the burdensome “complexity and lunacy” tax lawyers often face. His career as a trial lawyer was never fated to last long as well. Having graduated from law school in 1983, Grisham was elected to his state’s House of Representatives that same year, serving the Democratic Party until 1990. His legal practice lasted a decade.

While hanging around the courts in 1984, Grisham met a young girl with an intriguing story to tell about a case in which she was involved. The things she told him about her life touched him so much that he began to write his first novel based on her story. It was published in 1989 and is called Time to Kill. As a new author, Grisham had difficulty finding a publisher for his first book. He finally found one that was willing to let him have a printing of 5,000 copies.

The day after his first novel was released, Grisham went straight back to writing, working on his second novel, without waiting to find out if he would be a success. His confidence apparently was well-founded because his second novel, The Firm, stayed on the Best Seller List for New York Times an impressive 47 weeks after its release and was the top selling novel for 1991. It was at that time that Grisham decided to leave legal practice and become a full time writer.

Throughout his writing career, John Grisham has seen many successes, starting with his very first book and continuing through each subsequent novel. He is the author behind many well-recognized titles, including The Pelican Brief, as well as The Rainmaker, The Racketeer, A Painted House, amongst several others.

For his great writing, Grisham has been honored with several awards, including the Distinguished Author Award named after Peggy V. Helmerich, the Galaxy British Book lifetime achievement award, the legal fiction award from Harper Lee, and the USC Scripter award. Nevertheless, Grisham’s writing has not solely focused on crafting novels for adult audiences. He has also written a series of legal thrillers geared at children and pre-teens.

Inside John Grisham Novels:

Two of the books Grisham is most well-known for also happen to be the very first two novels he ever released; The Firm and Time to Kill. The Firm, released in 1991, has sold more than seven million copies. It is the second novel that he wrote and is the gripping tale about a young man named Mitchell V. McDeere who, fresh out of law school, decides to work at a Memphis law firm, appeased by their generous offer of a high salary, new car, and nice house with low interest mortgage.

Soon after he arrives, two of his collogues at the firm die in a mysterious accident. During their memorial service, Mitch learns that there have been others who worked at the firm and mysteriously died. The information causes him to be very suspicious. His intuition is later validated when he gets approached by the FBI who wants his help in gathering evidence against those at the law firm, revealing the fact that they are actually involved in organized crime.

Grisham’s first novel, Time to Kill was the one based off his chance meeting with a young girl as he hung around the courts one day. The story is about a ten-year-old girl in the south who happens to be African American and gets raped by two racist white men. The girl’s father finds out the story of the attack on his daughter and realizes that a similar incident happened a while back.

In an effort to protect others from the same harm, he kills the two white men and is later arrested. He then calls his friend Jake to help, but the case is made more complicated by the KKK seeking revenge for the death of the two men. They start riots outside the courtroom, kill the frail husband of Jake’s assistant, wire Jake’s car with a bomb, and eventually burn his house down.

The Transformation of John Grisham Books Into Movies:

Grisham has experienced much success with the silver screen. More than eight of the novels he has written have been adapted into films and performed well at the box office. This includes The Firm, which became a film in 1993, and was later made into a TV series.

The movie starred Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Time to Kill hit box offices in 1996 and starred Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Ashley Judd, and several other stars. Other novels written by Grisham that have become movies include, The Client in 1994, The Chamber in 1996, The Rainmaker in 1997, Mickey in 2004, and several others.

47 Responses to “John Grisham”

Love all Mr. Grisham’s books, but The Street Lawyer is one of my favorites. Carry on, Sir!

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John Grisham

A short biography of john grisham.

The Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction Award in 2011

John Grisham’s Writing Style

Point of view, tone of his novels.

The tale is, in the well-known speech, a “page-turner,” and in this way, it isn’t important or even attractive for the writer to trouble the readers’ psyche with philosophical or moral contemplations. Surely, the activities of the hero have substantial moral ramifications; however, what a definitive moral articulation of the novel is proposed to be is hard to state. 

Foreshadowing

Major themes.

For example in his first novel, he writes that Carl Lee Hailey incidentally shoots a cop, Looney, who accompanies Tonya’s attackers to the court. Hailey’s legal advisor Jake says that Carl doesn’t plan to execute a cop. Jake promptly inquires as to whether Looney is alright. Lucien sincerely answers that “Looney is fine. Simply short a leg.” It sounds amusing, in light of the fact that it is exceptionally dubious that Looney is cheerful without his leg.

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The View hosts stress 'it's all fiction' as John Grisham says he considered writing more Supreme Court assassinations

"The court has never looked this bad," Grisham said on "The View," after noting that he "thought about" writing more Supreme Court deaths after "Pelican Brief."

Writer John Grisham prompted a swift clarification from The View cohosts when he suggested that the current state of the Supreme Court made him consider writing another book about the assassination of justices following The Pelican Brief .

The 69-year-old author appeared Wednesday on the talk show to promote his new book Camino Ghosts , which features View moderator Whoopi Goldberg as narrator of its audio edition. As the interview shifted to current affairs, Grisham said that he's "not really noted for accuracy" when it comes to reflecting real life, though panelist Joy Behar said she felt his work is "art imitating life" before asking him about upcoming projects.

"Life right now in the courtroom is getting a little scary. Let's take the Supreme Court right now. A lot of people have issues with them," the 81-year-old said. "Do you have any thoughts on that? Or maybe writing a book or making a movie out of that?"

Grisham reminded her of "a great book called The Pelican Brief , in which two Supreme Court justices were assassinated," before telling her that he's "thought about doing it again."

The show's studio audience laughed after Grisham's comment, though his words elicited a quick point of clarification from the cohosts.

"Writing part two. He's talking about writing part two," Goldberg said, turning to the crowd.

"It's all fiction," Grisham added. "It's all fiction," Sunny Hostin observed. "It's all fiction," Goldberg repeated.

"It's just fiction," Behar, too, stressed. "It's made-up stories!"

Still, Grisham continued, saying that “the court has never looked this bad, in my lifetime," citing "the rulings" and "the ethical challenges" as the basis for his assessment.

"It went downhill in 2000, when five Republicans on the court chose to elect the president. That was the most political," he said.

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Grisham for comment.

Sign up for  Entertainment Weekly 's free daily newsletter   to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Grisham appeared at the end of an episode led by an interview with First Lady Jill Biden. In the year leading up to the November election, The View has welcomed several high-profile political guests on both sides of the aisle. In January, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared at the Hot Topics table to warn that "we should all be scared" of a potential second-term Trump presidency, months after Hillary Clinton issued a similar word of caution to viewers as she sat for an interview with the cohosts.

The View  airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on  ABC .

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The Complete John Grisham Book List

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John Grisham is a master of legal thrillers. His novels have captured the attention of millions of readers, from adults to teens. Over three decades, he has written nearly one book per year, and a number of those have been adapted into popular movies.

From his debut novel " A Time to Kill " to the 2020 release of "A Time for Mercy," Grisham's books are nothing short of captivating. Over the years, he's branched out from legal stories as well. His complete list of published books includes stories about sports as well as non-fiction. It's a compelling body of literature.

Lawyer Turned Best-Selling Author

Grisham was working as a criminal defense attorney in Southaven, Mississippi when he wrote his first novel, "A Time to Kill." It is based on an actual court case that dealt with racial issues in the South. It enjoyed modest success.

He entered politics, serving in the state legislature on the Democratic ticket. Meanwhile, he began writing his second novel. It was not Grisham's intent to leave law and politics to become a published author, but the runaway success of his second endeavor, "The Firm," changed his mind.

Grisham quickly became a prolific, best-selling author. In addition to novels, he has published short stories, nonfiction, and young adult books.

Grisham Captures Mainstream Readers From 1989–2000

Few new writers have exploded onto the literary scene like John Grisham. " The Firm " became the top-selling book of 1991 and was on The New York Times Best Seller List for nearly 50 weeks. In 1993, it was made into a movie, the first of many to come based on Grisham's novels .

From "The Pelican Brief" through "The Brethren," Grisham continued to produce legal thrillers at the rate of about one per year. He tapped into his experience as a lawyer to create characters who faced moral dilemmas and dangerous situations.

During the first decade of his work, multiple novels were eventually made into major big-screen films. These include "Pelican Brief" in 1993, "The Client" in 1994, "A Time to Kill" in 1996, "The Chamber" in 1996, and "The Rainmaker" in 1997.

• 1989 - "A Time to Kill"
• 1991 - "The Firm"
• 1992 - "The Pelican Brief"
• 1993 - "The Client"
• 1994 - "The Chamber"
• 1995 - "The Rainmaker"
• 1996 - "The Runaway Jury"
• 1997 - "The Partner"
• 1998 - "The Street Lawyer"
• 1999 - "The Testament"
• 2000 - "The Brethren"

Grisham Branches Out From 2001–2010

As the best-selling author entered his second decade of writing, he stepped back from his legal thrillers to examine other genres.

"A Painted House" is a small-town mystery. "Skipping Christmas" is about a family that decides to skip Christmas. He also examined his interest in sports with "Bleachers," which tells the story of a high school football star returning to his hometown after his coach dies. The theme continued in "Playing for Pizza," a story about an American playing football in Italy.

In 2010, Grisham introduced himself to a younger audience with "Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer," written for middle school readers.

Also in this decade, Grisham released "Ford County," his first collection of short stories, and "The Innocent Man," his first nonfiction book; the latter is about an innocent man on death row. Not to turn his back on his dedicated fans, he rounded out this period with several legal thrillers as well.

• 2001 - "A Painted House"
• 2001 - "Skipping Christmas"
• 2002 - "The Summons"
• 2003 - "The King of Torts"
• 2003 - "Bleachers"
• 2004 - "The Last Juror"
• 2005 - "The Broker"
• 2006 - "The Innocent Man"
• 2007 - " Playing for Pizza"
• 2008 - "The Appeal"
• 2009 - "The Associate"
• 2009 - "Ford County" (short stories)
• 2010 - "Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer"
• 2010 - "The Confession"

2011 to Present: Grisham Revisits Past Successes

Following the success of the first "Theodore Boone" book, Grisham followed up with six more books, turning it into a popular series.

In "Sycamore Row," a sequel to "A Time to Kill," Grisham brought back protagonist Jake Brigance and key supporting characters Lucien Wilbanks and Harry Rex Vonner. He continued his policy of writing one legal thriller every year and threw in a couple of short stories and a baseball novel called "Calico Joe" for good measure. 

Grisham's 30th book was released in 2017, titled "Camino Island." Another intriguing crime novel, the story centers around stolen F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts. Between a young, enthusiastic writer; the FBI; and a secret agency, the investigation tries to track down these handwritten documents on the black market.

Following this came "The Rooster Bar," which follows three law students who suspect that their school is not what it claims to be. "The Recoking" is the story of a war hero who commits a surprising crime. Finally, "A Time for Mercy" brings readers back to Mississippi for another sequel to the well-loved "A Time to Kill."

• 2011 - "Theodore Boone: The Abduction"
• 2011 - "The Litigators"
• 2012 - "Theodore Boone: The Accused"
• 2012 - "Calico Joe"
• 2012 - "The Racketeer"
• 2013 - "Theodore Boone: The Activist"
• 2013 - " Sycamore Row"
• 2014 - "Gray Mountain"
• 2015 - "Theodore Boone: The Fugitive"
• 2015 - "Rogue Lawyer"
• 2016 - "Partners" (a "Rogue Lawyer" short story)
• 2016 - "Theodore Boone: The Scandal"
• 2016 - "Witness to a Trial" (a digital short story)
• 2016 - "The Whistler"
• 2017 - "Camino Island"
• 2017 - "The Rooster Bar"
• 2018 - "The Reckoning"
• 2019 - "The Guardians"
• 2019 - "Theodore Boone: The Accomplice"
• 2020 - "Camino Winds"
• 2020 - "A Time for Mercy"
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Mystery Sequels

John Grisham Books In Order – The Complete List of Books

John Grisham is a New York Times bestselling author of popular and well-read legal thrillers such as The Firm, A Time To Kill, and The Client, many of which have been brought to the big screen.

Here are all the John Grisham books in order of reading, as well as in the order of publication. Most of his works are standalone books, so they can be easily read in any order you choose; however, if you are like me (and other ‘reading in order’ lovers), you will find this list quite helpful.

I put the list together a while ago and kept updating it in a Word document on my computer, as the author has written so many books, I didn’t want to miss out on any of them.

Latest John Grisham Books

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Theodore Boone Books in Publication Order

The Theodore Boone series features Theodore Boone, a so-called young lawyer of age 13 who spends more time in courtrooms than anywhere else. While he is not a real lawyer, he loves advising anyone who is asking.

• Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer ,  2010
• Theodore Boone: The Abduction , 2011
• Theodore Boone: The Accused ,  2012
• Theodore Boone: The Activist , 2013
• Theodore Boone: The Fugitive , 2015
• Theodore Boone: The Scandal , 2016
• Theodore Boone: The Accomplice , 2019

Lacy Stoltz / The Whistler Books in Publication Order

• Witness to a Trial (#0.5), 2016
• The Whistler (#1), 2016
• The Judge’s List (#2), 2021

Camino Island Books in Publication Order

• Camino Island , 2017
• Camino Winds , 2020
• Camino Ghost , 2024

Jake Brigance Books in Publication Order

featuring Carl Lee Hailey

• A Time To Kill , 1989
• Sycamore Row , 2013
• A Time for Mercy , 2020

The Firm Books / Mitch McDeere Books in Publication Order

• The Firm , 1991
• The Exchange , 2023

Rogue Lawyer Books in Publication Order

• Rogue Lawyer , 2015
• Partners , 2016 (short story)

John Grisham Storycuts in Order of Publication

• Casino , 2011
• Fish Files , 2011
• Quiet Haven , 2011

Short Stories / Novellas in Order of Publication

• Fetching Raymond , 2011
• The Tumor , 2015

Short Story Collections in Order of Publication

• Ford County , 2009
• Sparring Partners , 2022

John Grisham Anthologies in Order of Publication

• The WaveDancer Benefit , 2002 – with Pat Conroy, Stephen King and Peter Straub
• Their World is Law , 2002
• Delta Blues , 2009
• Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit , 2010 (with Howard Bahr, Rick Bragg, Winston Groom, Janis Owens, Daniel Wallace, Brad Watson and Steve Yarbrough)
• Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering , 2024

John Grisham Standalone Novels in Order of Publication

• The Pelican Brief , 1992
• The Client , 1993
• The Chamber , 1994
• The Rainmaker , 1995
• The Runaway Jury , 1996
• The Partner , 1997
• The Street Lawyer , 1998
• The Testament , 1999, movie to be produced (TBA)
• The Brethren , 2000
• A Painted House , 2001
• Skipping Christmas , 2002
• The Summons , 2002
• The King Of Torts , 2003
• Bleachers , 2003
• The Last Juror , 2004
• The Broker , 2005
• Playing for Pizza , 2007
• The Appeal , 2008
• The Associate , 2009, movie to be produced (TBA)
• The Confession , 2010
• The Litigators , 2011
• Calico Joe , 2012, movie to be produced (TBA)
• The Racketeer , 2012
• Gray Mountain , 2014
• The Rooster Bar , 2017
• The Reckoning , 2018
• The Guardians , 2019
• Sooley , 2021
• The Boys from Biloxi , 2022

Non-Fiction John Grisham Books in Publication Order

• The Innocent Man , 2006 – a nonfiction book about a wrongly convicted baseball player

All John Grisham Books in Order by Year / Publication Order

• A Time to Kill, 1989
• The Firm, 1991
• The Pelican Brief, 1992
• The Client, 1993
• The Chamber, 1994
• The Rainmaker, 1995
• The Runaway Jury, 1996
• The Partner, 1997
• The Street Lawyer, 1998
• The Testament, 1999
• The Brethren, 2000
• A Painted House, 2001
• Skipping Christmas, 2001
• The Summons, 2002
• The King of Torts, 2003
• Bleachers, 2003
• The Last Juror, 2004
• The Broker, 2005
• The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, 2006
• Playing for Pizza, 2007
• The Appeal, 2008
• The Associate, 2009
• Ford County, 2009
• Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, 2010
• The Confession, 2010
• Theodore Boone: The Abduction, 2011
• The Litigators, 2011
• Theodore Boone: The Accused, 2012
• Calico Joe, 2012
• The Racketeer, 2012
• Theodore Boone: The Activist, 2013
• Sycamore Row, 2013
• Gray Mountain, 2014
• Theodore Boone: The Fugitive, 2015
• Rogue Lawyer, 2015
• Partners, a Rogue Lawyer short story, 2016
• Theodore Boone: The Scandal, 2016
• The Whistler, 2016
• The Tumor, 2016
• Camino Island, 2017
• The Rooster Bar, 2017
• The Reckoning, 2018
• The Guardians, 2019
• Theodore Boone: The Accomplice, 2019
• Camino Winds, 2020
• A Time for Mercy, 2020
• Sooley, 2021
• The Judge’s List, 2021
• The Boys from Biloxi, 2022
• Sparring Partners, 2022
• The Exchange, 2023
• Fourteen Days, 2024
• Camino Ghosts, 2024
• Framed, 2024

John Grisham Biography – About the Author

New York Times bestselling author John Grisham was born in 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. After graduating from Mississippi State University, he attended the University of Mississippi School of Law, a prestigious law school, after which he worked as a criminal lawyer in a law firm. Between 1984-1990, he served in the House of  Representatives in  Mississippi.

Having been a criminal lawyer with his legal practice for a decade, the author has plenty of knowledge for his books, and this shows greatly.

No wonder so many of his books have been adapted into movies, as they are chilling, suspenseful, and very realistic.

Along with Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowlings, John Grisham is one of the few authors who has sold 2 million copies of the first printed books.

Before becoming one of the top legal mystery and thriller authors, John Grisham was working in a small law firm as a criminal defense attorney, trying to make time to write his debut novel.

As a formal lawyer, John Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill , published in 1989, 4 years after he started writing it, has an interesting history. One day the author heard a young girl telling her story to the court, and he got so interested that went to listen to the whole case. And so his first idea for a book came to life.

As he mentioned on his website:

I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

As soon as he finished writing A Time To Kill, he was already working on his second novel, The Firm – which ended up being pretty much the book that propelled him into instant fame. Even if you’ve never read The Firm , I’m sure you’ve at least watched the same-titled movie with Tom Cruise.

Until 1996 the author got a serious writing fever and wrote a novel a year. In 1996 he took a small break from writing to go back to being a lawyer with a case that he won.

However, his main career nowadays is still writing books (“Thank God for that” say all his loyal followers). So how many books has John Grisham written so far? He has written over 50 books to date, with a latest collaboration, Fourteen Days, published in 2024.

One of my favorite John Grisham book is The Guardians , a standalone legal thriller novel. It features the Guardians, a group similar to Project Innocence, which takes on the case of Quincy Miller, a young black man who was framed for killing Keith Russo, his lawyer. Cullen Post, who founded the Guardians, is its sole investigator, so he takes on the case and starts checking the facts.

However, here he might have gotten more than he bargained for when some powerful people are ready to kill again to keep their secret hidden.

So far, from his first novel, A Time to Kill, the author John Grisham has written around one to two novels a year, most of which became instant bestsellers, or at least crept up to the bestseller year very good. His books cover genres such as sports, adult thrillers, crime fiction, legal novels, and young action/thrillers. So far nine of his books have been turned into popular movies. I have read all his books except for his non-fiction works, and I patiently wait every year for new releases.

John Grisham has written over 50 novels, out of which at least 28 have become number-one bestselling fiction books. If you ask 10 different people, each will have their favorites. Nevertheless, most John Grisham book readers do agree that The Firm , the author’s second book, featuring Mitch McDeere is probably the most-read one, the best-known, and one that people who are new to this author should start with.

The Firm has sold over seven million copies, which makes it a favorite in the genre, overall.

What Are the Best John Grisham Books Overall?

Here are what I think are some of the best novels by John Grisham that worth reading. Obviously, The Firm is his most popular novel, but I think these additional books are good entry points to the author’s writing.

• A Time to Kill
• The Pelican Brief
• The Rainmaker

What Is John Grisham’s Latest Book?

The latest novel written by John Grisham is titled Camino Ghost, the third in the Camino Island series. Framed, a non-fiction book dealing with wrongful convictions will be released in October 2024.

The John Grisham Novels Turned Into Movies

• A Time to Kill , 1989, adapted into a movie in 1996 starring Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Ashley Judd
• The Firm , 1991, adapted into a movie in 1993 starring Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, and Jeanne Tripplehorn and a TV series running between 2011-2012
• The Pelican Brief , 1992, adapted into a movie in 1993 starring Julia Roberts as Darby Shaw, Denzel Washington
• The Client , 1993, adapted into a movie in 1994 starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, and a TV show running between 1995-1996
• The Chamber , 1994, adapted into a movie in 1996 starring  Chris O’Donnell, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway
• The Rainmaker , 1995, adapted into a movie in 1997 starring Matt Damon as Rudy Baylor, Danny DeVito
• The Runaway Jury , 1996, adapted into a movie in 2003 starring John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman
• A Painted House , 2001, adapted into a TV film in 2003 starring Robert Sean Leonard, Logan Lerman
• Skipping Christmas , 2002, adapted into a movie called Christmas With The Kranks in 2004 starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd
• The Innocent Man , his true-crime story, has been made into a Netflix documentary.

15 Comments

Love your books!I am a shut in senior on a (very)fixed income,who lives with a miserable drunk called husband!????????I am praying ????????you can help me.im looking for these titles and can send you a cheque or cash.as I’m not asking for a hand-out.can you mail to?:the client,the runaway jury,the broker, calico joe,gray mountain, partners,a time for mercy,the tumor, quiet haven,fish files casino,fetching Raymond,Delta blues,Camino winds, rainmaker,the testament,the reckoning,and all of the Theodore Boone books unless these are for children?I promise you I will pay for any/all of the above books..please be an angel and help an old woman out.i am sorry if I am bothering you,it stinks to have no one on this earth,and just waiting to ………I have no credit cards,I still use cheques(they are personalized)for everything or cash.i hate to beg,but I’m begging.very sincerely Marion p.s.used books are fine????????????????????????????

I have read all of JG book. Love them & keep my eye out for the next release. They keep in in suspense & unable to put the book down. Last one read was Spanning partners which I did not enjoy as much as his other books

I just finished Gray Mountain. Please do not let it end like that. I sure hope there is sequel.

I have not read very many of your books, but I just finished gray Mountain. I so badly want another book about these people and their quest to get these coal people. This was so exciting. Please make another book.

First of all, thank you for creating this website! It’s super useful and helpful for a John Grisham fan like me! However I just noticed that “The Firm” is not on the list of “All John Grisham Books in Order by Year / Publication Order”. Could you please check if this list is complete? Because I just started to read/re-read all John Grisham books in chronological order by their publication dates, according to this list. Many thanks!

Thank you so much for noticing the error. I have fixed it now. The Firm was included as the first in its own series, alas, I missed adding it in the chronological book list.

I am a big fan of JG, my first was the client and ever since i have been glued to many others. Such an awesome author.

Are any of his books on BARB (a service for blind people)?

My summer author during the pandemic Hope there are enough books to list me they the crisis.I really am enjoying JG books and now hav husband reading them too.Thanks to great authors for your Wonderful treats.Oh yes books are my addiction!!! ES

I just received the ebook through Libby of Camino Winds, and I am enjoying how you have refreshed my mind of Camino Island in a few short chapters. Before I ordered the ebook I made sure that I still had my copy of the Camino Island on the shelf in case I had to make a reference to it.

I would like to thank you for making your books available through Libby. I have read The Brethren and The Guardians through Libby because I had to have the middle lobe of my right lung removed with Robot Surgery. With the ebook I can read without worrying about staying awake to turn the lamp off and getting up to do it.

The Rooster Bar should be classified as a standalone book as it has nothing to do with The Whistler series whatsoever.

I have just finished reading my first book by Mr. Grisham. The Partner. This book keeps you anxious to the very end. The ending was not a fairy tale. However, it does reveal true grieving, love, and that life goes on. It is very clear to me Mr. Grisham is gifted in writing. I look toward to reading other books he has written.

My first Grisham was The Street Lawyer also with his Michael Brock character!! I have been hooked ever since! The Chamber is one of my all time faves! John is such an amazing author; I hope he continues writing for many years to come!

The very first book I read of yours, was The Street Lawyer. It was such a good book, I couldn’t put it down. I guess I could say I was addicted! I’ve read most of your books. I’m a fan for sure.

I haven’t read but your first half dozen novels, but I just finished reading The Confession and I must say that it’s one of the better written novels I’ve read over the years! Such a heartfelt story that I literally couldn’t put down! I guess I’ll have to start buying all the rest of your books now!

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Give Grisham another shot: ‘Camino Ghosts’ a far better effort than ‘The Exchange’

If you’re a John Grisham fan who was put off by last year’s disastrous sequel to “The Firm,” “The Exchange,” you might want to give him another chance.

The legal thriller maestro’s “Camino Ghosts” returns him to the genial characters from his “Camino Island” and “Camino Winds,” who all check in and out of a remarkably prosperous bookstore on the fictitious Camino Island, which Grisham has said was inspired by Amelia Island, off the coast of northern Florida.

Like the other “Camino” books, “Ghosts” is briefer and more light-hearted than Grisham’s straight-up legal thrillers – no one gets killed during the course of the new one, or even seriously threatened.

The “Camino” books have felt like palate cleansers for Grisham, something fun to do before tackling the weightier issues that usually form the backbone of books such as “The Client” and “The Associate.” (The first “Camino Island” was a caper, touched off by the theft of an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript).

“Ghosts” blends legal thriller elements with the friendly bickering of the island’s residents. Bookstore owner Bruce Cable and his pals come to the assistance of a woman named Lovely Jackson, who is descended from enslaved people and who is attempting to establish a claim on a now-deserted island, where her ancestors lived after they escaped from slavery.

As usual, Grisham has a few legal surprises to spring on us as the case unfolds and his characters, while not particularly deep, are fun to hang out with.

Most importantly, the plotting instincts that deserted Grisham in “Exchange” are back in “Camino Ghosts.” The legal case may drag out over months, as actual legal cases do, but Grisham makes sure the book moves like the winds that buffet his fictional island.

Camino Ghosts

By: John Grisham.

Publisher: Doubleday, 293 pages, $29.95

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John grisham says supreme court ‘has never looked this bad’.

Famous novelist bashes rulings, ethics of Supreme Court

Novelist John Grisham joined ABC’s “The View” this week to promote his work, but ended up joining the ladies in blasting the Supreme Court.

He opined on the justices while Democratic lawmakers have called for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to recuse himself from cases related to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot after reports from The New York Times surfaced that the justice flew flags at his home which had a connection to Jan. 6 rioters.

”The court has never looked this bad,” Mr. Grisham said.

“In my lifetime, some of the rulings, the ethical challenges, it went downhill in 2000 when five Republicans on the court chose to elect a president, it was political, Bush vs. Gore, that’s when it all started really going downhill,” he said.

Mr. Grisham, a Democratic former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, is known for writing thrillers centering on court trials and other legal processes.

He wrote a 1992 novel about two Supreme Court justices being assassinated, and joked during his appearance on “The View” on Wednesday about doing a sequel.

His comments come at a time when Justice Alito, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Senate Democrats are at odds.

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, requested Justice Alito recuse himself from cases related to the Capitol riot over the flag flap.

Justice Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his Alexandria, Virginia, home days after the violent protest and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his New Jersey residence in 2023. Critics say Jan. 6 rioters carried the same flag.

Justice Alito said the flying of the flags was his wife’s decisions and that he’s not biased in any dispute.

Democratic lawmakers have called the flags a public display of political activity, which would run afoul of judicial ethics. One House Democrat introduced a censure resolution that demands that the justice recuse himself from any case related to the 2020 election.

The calls for recusal come as the high court is weighing two major disputes this term over whether Mr. Trump is immune from charges stemming from his contest of the 2020 election results and another dispute over an obstruction charge facing hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, including Mr. Trump.

Those opinions are expected to come by the end of June.

Mr. Durbin also called for a meeting with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to discuss ethics concerns but on Thursday, the chief justice declined the meeting, saying it would be improper to meet with lawmakers from one political party.

• Alex Swoyer can be reached at [email protected] .

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