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John Grisham Books |
John Grisham is a household name, and not just amongst the avid readers of his legal thrillers. The background of courtroom legal wranglings is not everyone's
cup of tea when it comes to the mystery thriller, but Grisham pulls it off magnificently, probably because court room battles were a part of his job in the not-so-distant past. Born of working class parents, his early dreams of being a professional baseball player came to nothing when he bravely realized that he didn't have what it takes in the sports arena, although he plainly possessed good old fashioned stickability. He studied law in Mississippi and joined a practice as a lawyer in a small practice. After overhearing the testimony of a young rape victim, Grisham's imagination was activated and he started the first in a long line of John Grisham books ...
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His first book, Time To Kill, which followed the theme of revenge of the father of a young rape victim, eventually got published in a limited run, but was not a huge commercial success. Grisham was in the habit of waking at five a.m. every work morning to write for a few hours before starting his job - hsi motivation was impressive. He immediately started work on his second book about a bright young attorney joining a swish law firm, but everything was not as it seemed. He sold the film rights, and The Firm was a big success, played on the screen by Tom Cruise. By this time John Grisham books were big business and he was literary man of the moment in 1991, at which time 'The Firm' was a best seller. The rest is history, as they say in the best stories. John Grisham books have been translated into 29 different languages and over 250 million copies have been sold all over the world. Nine of these have also been made into films, including The Pelican Brief, The Firm and The Client. Now comfortably off, he has returned to his teenage passion of baseball and is a supporter of little league activities where he lives, having constructed several baseball fields on his property for little league games to promote the game and involve the local community. Grisham has also experimented with non-fiction work, and has also produced a volume of short stories, but it is the longer novels navigating the twists and turns of the criminal legal system where he excels and makes his greatest success. Grisham was also elected as a Democrat in the Mississippi state legislature from 1983 to 1990, and by his second term at the Mississippi state legislature, he was a member of several other committees. He returned briefly to the bar in 1996 to fight for the family of a railroad worker who was killed on the job, which was to honor a commitment made before he gave up law as a profession. Grisham won the case, and the jury awarded the family the biggest compensation amount ever made in Grisham's law career.
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