Biography of John Grisham
Pulled from his official online biography: John Grisham was born in 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. His father was a construction worker, and his mother was a homemaker. He received his law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1981. He set up his law practice in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, Grisham was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, where he served until 1990.
Grisham was inspired to write his first novel, A Time to Kill, to which Sycamore Row is a sequel, while listening to the testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim and imagining what would have happened if her father had killed her assailants. He worked on this book in his spare time and finished it in 1987. It was finally published in 1988 with a printing of only 5,000 copies. By the time A Time to Kill was published, Grisham had already started on his second novel, and writing gradually became his life. He has averaged a novel a year since then, and nine of his novels have been made into movies.
The first video below is a routine book-plug appearance in which Grisham discusses Sycamore Row with the "CBS This Morning" crew. The second one is a BBC interview in which Grisham discusses his own personal struggles with racism, having grown up in the South when he did. I included it because it contains some political commentary I found interesting, given the way the most recent national election turned out.
No comments:
Post a Comment