John Grisham

John Grisham (born 8 February 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas) is an American lawyer turned novelist, best known for legal thrillers such as The Firm and A Time to Kill, with around 300 million copies sold worldwide.

He practised law for about a decade and sat as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. His first novel, A Time to Kill, was turned down by many publishers before the small Wynwood Press brought it out in 1989 in a printing of 5,000 copies. The Firm (Doubleday, 1991) was his breakthrough, spending 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and selling more than seven million copies. A run of bestsellers followed, among them The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client (1993), The Chamber (1994), The Rainmaker (1995) and The Runaway Jury (1996), and he has continued to publish into the 2020s with titles such as The Rooster Bar (2017) and The Widow (2025). He has twice won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, received the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction, and serves on the boards of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries. He lives on a farm in central Virginia.

For collectors

The Wynwood Press first edition of A Time to Kill (1989) is the scarce Grisham book, because only 5,000 copies were printed before he was famous. After The Firm succeeded, Wynwood issued a trade paperback, Dell a mass-market paperback and Doubleday a special hardcover, so collectors need to separate the 1989 Wynwood hardback from these later editions. Doubleday published the US first edition of The Firm in 1991.