Life and Works of American Writer – John Grisham


 


John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955,  a former politician, retired attorney, American novelist and author best known for his works of modern legal drama.


Family


His father is 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.  Grisham is the second eldest of the five siblings


III Early Childhood
            Like every kid, he loves to play professional baseball from the time he was six years old until he in his 20.   It took a long time for the dream to die.  It took a long time to realize that he didn’t have the talent to play, which he had always difficulty in acceptance. 


            There was a fundamental moment of his childhood.  He grew up in a very small, close-knit, Southern Baptist family, where everything was off-limits.  So he couldn’t wait to get to college and have some fun.  And he did for the first two years.  However, he had regretted a lot of it, because his grades were in terrible shape.  He never got in serious trouble, except for his grades.


There were a couple of things that were very important in Grisham’s childhood.  Number one, his mother did not believe in television.  They just didn’t watch much of it.  She just thought it was bad, and that was 30 years ago.  She believed in books, and they were taught to read early.  They were encouraged to read, throughout childhood and adolescence, by his mother.


They moved a lot when he was a kid, throughout the deep South.  They would always go to a new town and go to the library, get their library cards and load up with books.  And they would spend their time reading, reading to each other.  And his mother spent a lot of time reading to us.  He had always had a love for books and a love for literature and a love for reading.  Strangely, he never thought about writing until late in life.



IV Education


As the best-selling novelist in America, 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.  His book, The Pelican Brief, about a female law student investigating the murders of two Supreme Court justices, has already been judged “an even stronger performance” than The Firm.  Both Pelican Brief and The Firm were made into successful movies, as was his subsequent novel, The Client.


            Encouraged by his mother, young Grisham was an avid reader, especially influenced by the work of John Steinbeck whose clarity he admired.  He had the benefit of some very good high school English teachers, one in particular during his last year in high school.  He was then a jock, and was not a student.  Although he enjoyed reading, that was about it as far as academics.


But his teacher forced them to read good books and good writers, particularly good American writers.  They weren’t too thrilled to do it initially, but she taught them how to do it.  Through that, Grisham discovered some of his favorite authors, particularly John Steinbeck.  Once he had gone through all of Steinbeck’s books, he realized that he had a wonderful experience.


Grisham can still remember reading a lot of Steinbeck in high school and thinking that he would love to be able to write it clearly.  At the same time they had to read Faulkner.  So they had Faulkner on one hand, and Steinbeck on the other and Steinbeck looked remarkably clear, compared to Faulkner.


For two years of college, he realized he was going nowhere.  And before his junior year in college he said to himself, “Enough of the partying, it’s time to get busy and get serious.” It was then that he decided to study accounting, which was a tough degree to get, and to take that and go to law school and become a tax lawyer.  He had sort of a business background, or mentality.  That’s what he enjoyed and he really did.  At that point he just said, “Okay, it’s time to get serious.”  He was 20 years old then. And at about the same time that he decided to forget about playing baseball.  He would have played baseball in junior college, and so it was time for that boyhood dream to go away.  At that point he was no longer a kid.


College or University


By his own account, he had no interest in writing until after he embarked on his professional career.  For his first two years in college, Grisham drifted, attending 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 established a small private legal practice in Southaven Mississippi.  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.


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 law practice and moved his family to Oxford, Mississippi, determined to concentrate on his writing.


V  Contribution to society


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


 


Novels 


By far, Grisham has 18 novels some of which are made into movies.  The following are his novels published: 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).


Novels Into Movies


The movies from his books include: The Firm (1993); The Pelican Brief (1993 ); The Client (1994, ); The Chamber (1996); A Time to Kill (1996); The Rainmaker (1997); and The Gingerbread Man (1998).


Media Adaptations


Motion Pictures:


§  The Firm. Dir. Sydney Pollack. Paramount Pictures, 1993. Based on the novel.


§  The Pelican Brief. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Warner Bros., 1993. Based on the novel.


§  The Client. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros., 1994. Based on the Novel.


§  The Chamber. Dir. James Foley. Universal Pictures, 1996. Based on the novel.


§  A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros., 1996. Based on the novel.


§  The Rainmaker. Dir. Francis Coppola. Constellation Films, 1997. Based on the novel.


§  The Gingerbread Man. Story by John Grisham. Dir. Robert Altman. Enchanter Entertainment, 1998.


§  A Painted House. Dir. Alfonso Arau. Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions and CBS-TV, 2003. Based on the novel.


§  Runaway Jury. Dir. Gary Fleder. New Regency Pictures, 2003. Based on the novel.


§  The Street Lawyer. Dir. Paris Barclay. Touchstone Television and ABC-TV, 2003.


§  Mickey. Dir. Hugh Wilson. Original screenplay by John Grisham. Mickey Productions, 2004.


§  Christmas with the Kranks. Dir. Joe Roth. Skipping Christmas Productions, 1492 Pictures, and Revolution Studios, 2004. Based on the novel Skipping Christmas.


Television Shows:


§  The Client. 1995-96. Based on the novel and movie.


Marriage


John and his wife, Renee, live with their two children Ty and Shea.  They split their time up between their Mississippi house and farm and a Charlotteville, Virginia, plantation.  When John isn’t writing, John devotes his time to charitable causes.  He is also the Little League commissioner of his local area.  He built six fields on his property, which are the home to 26 Little League teams and over 350 players.



As the first influence of John Grisham, here is some of the personal information about John Steinbeck.


 


 


Life and Works of John Steinbeck



 
           John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902.  Steinbeck’s father was a county treasurer and his mother was a teacher.

Education    


He attended  Stanford University intermittently between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing. His experiences among the working classes in California lent authenticity to his depiction of the lives of the workers who remain the central characters of his most important novels. Steinbeck spent much of his life in Monterey County, the setting of much of his fiction.



V  Contribution to society


American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist, John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  He is best remembered for THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic. The impact of the book has been compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Steinbeck’s epic about the migration of the Joad family, driven from its bit of land in Oklahoma to California, provoked a wide debate about the hard lot of migrant laborers, and helped to put an agricultural reform into effect.


Novels


Steinbeck’s first three novels went unnoticed, but in 1935 appeared his humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans, TORTILLA FLAT, which brought him wider recognition. However, the theme of the book – the story of King Arthur and the forming of the Round Table – remained well hidden from the critics. Steinbeck’s financial situation improved significantly – he had earned a week for a long time, but now he was paid thousands of dollars for the film rights to Tortilla Flat.


Steinbeck’s later writings were comparatively slight works of entertainment and journalism, but he did make conscientious attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist: Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). None of these works equaled the critical reputation of his earlier novels. Steinbeck’s reputation depends mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote during the Depression. It is in these works that Steinbeck is most effective in his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying the archetypal qualities of his characters.


Marriage


Steinbeck married Carol Henning in 1930 and lived with her in Pacific Grove, California. He spent much of his time in Monterey with Ricketts at his Cannery Row laboratory, an experience which led to his popular 1945 novel, Cannery Row. In 1943, Steinbeck married his second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger with whom he had two children. 1948 was a particularly bad year for Steinbeck: his friend Ricketts died and his wife Gwyndolyn left him. However, he found happiness in his 1950 marriage to Elaine Scott, with whom he lived in New York City. Two years later, he published the highly controversial East of Eden, the novel he called “the big one,” set in the California Salinas Valley.


John Steinbeck died in New York City in 1968.


 


 



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