John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, lawyer and former member of the 7th district of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his popular legal thrillers.
According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 28 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide.
Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practised criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.
Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. Grisham’s first bestseller, The Firm, sold more than seven million copies.
The book was adapted into a 1993 feature film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, and a 2012 TV series which continues the story ten years after the events of the film and novel.
What style of writing is John Grisham?
Grisham writes legal thrillers, a type of novel that has virtually become a genre of its own in recent years. Grisham credits writer Scott F. Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987) for beginning the trend, but his own novels have served to define that trend.
With The Firm, Grisham began a pattern (some critics call it a formula) that he used, with variations, in most of his succeeding books. His plots usually centre around protagonists who are young and in some way vulnerable, who are placed in extraordinary circumstances.
They find themselves fighting against overwhelming odds in situations in which they should not be able to prevail. Ultimately they may win out over antagonists of apparently superior strength: the U.S. government, the Mafia, and giant insurance companies. However, Grisham cannot be counted on to give his readers a standard happy ending.
How many words a day does John Grisham write?
John Grisham’s daily word count: 1,000 to 2,000 words.
In a 2016 interview with Brian Koppelman, John Grisham described his daily writing routine; the same one that has powered his work for the past 20-odd years. “I’ll write for a couple of hours, take a break, then get back into the novel,” the best-selling author explained.
“On a good day, I’ll write 2,000 words. A slow day is 1,000. But you do that five days a week for six months and that’s a lot of pages, and that’s how the books are written.”