July-August 1997
Standing Firm
"I have often asked God what are the reasons for my successand I am still looking for the answer."
Author John Grisham, master of the legal thriller, finds success in his work, his family and his God.
by Jennifer Ferranti
It isn't often John Grisham, America's premier author of legal thrillers, agrees to speak in public. So a group of college students in North Oxford, Mississippi, were elated when he came to talk to them. But it was soon apparent at least one person in the room was not enamored with the best-selling author's fame and fortune-Grisham himself.
Somberly he explained his humble perspective on success. "One of my best friends in college died when he was 25, just a few years after we had finished Mississippi State University. I was in law school, and he called me one day and wanted to get together. So we had lunch, and he told me he had terminal cancer. "I couldn't believe it," Grisham remembers.
"I asked him, 'What do you do when you realize that you are about to die?'
"He said: 'It's real simple. You get things right with God, and you spend as much time with those you love as you can. Then you settle up with everybody else. You know, really, you ought to live every day like you have only a few more days to live.'"
Grisham says his friend's parting advice left a lasting impression on him.
That's not to say the 42-year-old superauthor isn't enjoying the fruits of his labors. His eight best-sellers-A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury and The Partner -- have sold a total of more than 60 million copies in 31 languages. Five of his books have been made into movies for which box office sales exceed $600 million. The premise of The Client became a popular television series. And an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man, which he wrote just before he hit the best-sellers list, is also in production.
All of this translates into a megadose of fame and fortune. Forbes magazine ranks Grisham as one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world. Last year alone he earned $43 million.
Humble Beginnings
But Grisham contends he never set out to be a writer, no less arguably the most commercially successful author in history.
After earning his law degree from the University of Mississippi, Grisham set up a small, country practice in Southhaven, Mississippi, a community of 25,000 located just across the state line from Memphis, Tennessee.
Practicing law for nearly 10 years, Grisham specialized in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. However, he admits: "My law career was not very fulfilling. I was a street lawyer, one of a thousand, in a profession that was and is terribly overcrowded. Competition was fierce, ethics often compromised, and I could never bring myself to advertise."
Then one day, at the DeSoto County courthouse, Grisham listened to the riveting testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim. The little girl's story moved Grisham greatly. In fact, it inspired him to rise every day at 5 a.m. for the next three years to write A Time to Kill, a novel about the retribution a black father seeks when his young daughter is raped by rednecks in a small southern town.
Grisham wrote that first book on a computer squeezed between the washer and dryer in the laundry room of his modest, two-bedroom brick house, scribbling down ideas that occurred to him throughout the day on court recesses. But when his novel was finished, the response from publishers was one rejection slip after another.
Finally, in 1989, Bill Thompson -- the editor who discovered Stephen King -- decided to take a chance on the aspiring author. Grisham
received a mere $15,000 advance, and a modest 5,000 copies of A Time to Kill were printed. Grisham purchased 1,000 of those himself, selling them out of the trunk of his car to anyone who would buy them. (Those first editions are now worth about $4,000 each.) Clearly, he couldn't quit his day job yet.
So Grisham continued to work 70 hours a week practicing law, serving in the Mississippi State Legislature to which he had been elected in 1983, and working on his second novel, The Firm. That book, however, captured the attention of Doubleday and garnered a $600,000 advance.
"One day I woke up and realized I had won the lottery," Grisham says. "I walked out of my law office without turning off the lights, and I have never looked back."
But, Grisham clarifies, that was not the most important day in his life.
Humble Faith
Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker,
Grisham's family moved from place to place in the Deep South, depending on where the work was.
Grisham says the first thing his family did when they moved into a new community was to find a good church. "My mother had us bathed and scrubbed and in church every Sunday," he recalls.
But at the age of 8, Grisham felt a need for more than church attendance. "I came under conviction [of sin] when I was in the third grade, and I told my mother, 'I don't understand this, but I need to talk to you.' We talked and she led me to Jesus. The following Sunday I made a public confession of my faith. That was the most important event in my life."
Grisham's faith has served as his moral compass ever since. "When I was actively practicing law, there were cases and clients I refused because of my faith," Grisham explains. He also didn't do divorce work because he believes today's laws make divorce too easy.
"I turned down certain criminal defendants because I couldn't bring myself to believe them or fight for them," he says. Grisham has also done pro bono work for churches with legal problems.
But today, Grisham's "clients" are the millions of readers clamoring for his next title. He admits: "When writing legal thrillers, it is difficult to convey a Christian message. That is not my motive or intent" with the exception, Grisham notes, of The Chamber, his novel about an inmate on death row and the issue of capital punishment.
Even though his books do not carry an overtly spiritual message, Grisham says he's never been tempted to resort to gratuitous sex, profanity or violence. "It's a moral choice I made from day one," he says. "I couldn't write a book that I would be embarrassed for my kids to read a few years from now. Plus my mother would kill me."
He adds, "It's very gratifying to sell [clean] booksand receive tons of mail from around the world from grateful people."
If not directly through his novels, how does Grisham communicate his faith? By example, he says. "I don't preach or give motivational speeches. I prefer to quietly live the faith." For Grisham that means maintaining a reclusive, Christian family lifestyle that snickers in the face of fame.
His idea of the good life is lazily sipping coffee on the front porch with Renee, his wife of 17 years, and working at home so he can watch their two children grow up. Son Ty is 13. Daughter Shea is 11.
The Grishams split their time between the Victorian home they built on a 67-acre farm outside of Oxford, Mississippi, and a 205-year-old plantation hideaway on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia. Lest these digs sound a tad modest, they include tennis courts, a croquet court, a swimming pool, six state-of-the-art baseball fields, three quarter horses, a full-time housekeeper, a maintenance man and a private jet.
"We still think of ourselves as regular people," Grisham insists. "We want to keep things normal for ourselves and for our kids."
Grisham defines "normal" as coaching his kids' Little League teams, teaching Sunday school, going on missions trips with people of his church, and donating generously to Christian organizations and other good causes. And, of course, normal for Grisham also means writing -- one new novel a year. His latest, The Partner, was released this spring.
Humble Purpose
"Fame can be a struggle, and all struggles test the faith," Grisham admits. "I go for long walks in the woods, and I ask myself if I'm handling [success] the way it ought to be handled."
But Grisham believes all this is temporary. "It will be over one of these days -- five years from now, 10 years from now. The books will stop selling for whatever reason."
And what will have mattered most? It's no mystery to the master of legal thrillers. God, family and helping other people, he says in a humble Southern drawl.
Jennifer Ferranti is a freelance journalist living in Fairfax Station, Virginia, who enjoys John Grisham novels so much, she buys them in hardback at full price.