What John Grisham has accomplished over the last thirty years is almost subtly impressive. He wasn’t a writer at first. He began his career as a small-town criminal defense attorney in Mississippi, putting in long hours in a courtroom that reeked of anxiety and old paper. Somewhere along the way, he started writing a novel. Not at the request of a publisher. Not because a deal was being discussed. simply because he couldn’t be left alone by a story.
Before anyone agreed, 28 publishers rejected that story, which eventually became A Time to Kill. 5,000 copies were printed in the first run. It was a low-key, circumspect debut that goes unnoticed. However, before the first book even reached the shelves, Grisham was already working on his next. The Firm, the following book, spent 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. In the end, Tom Cruise would take the lead. Eventually, the world would take notice.
It’s difficult to ignore a recurring theme in John Grisham’s body of work: the unsettling reality that the legal system, despite all of its formalities and procedures, is capable of extraordinary cruelty. His sole nonfiction work, The Innocent Man, makes this claim without any fictional pretense. It centers on Ron Williamson, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongfully convicted of murder in a small Oklahoma town and is currently incarcerated on death row despite the system’s lack of urgency. It feels somehow different from reading his thrillers, like a courtroom drama without the narrative safety net.
Most readers start with his stand-alone novels. The Pelican Brief pitted a law student against forces capable of killing justices of the Supreme Court without even blinking. With a rage that felt personal, The Rainmaker attacked the health insurance sector. The Runaway Jury entered the realm of tobacco litigation and transformed it into a chess game taking place in a burning structure. These novels quickly gained popularity, and the majority quickly made their way to Hollywood. Grisham became a brand as much as an author thanks to the film adaptations, which starred Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Matt Damon, and Gene Hackman. This is both a plus and a drawback.
There should be a separate discussion about the Jake Brigance series. Brigance first appeared in A Time to Kill as a young white defense lawyer in the made-up town of Clanton, Mississippi, defending a Black man who killed the men who had sexually assaulted his daughter. It’s the kind of idea that, in the wrong hands, could go horribly wrong. Grisham handled it with a specificity that still feels awkward in the best way possible, drawing on his years of experience observing actual courtrooms in the American South. Brigance’s story was carried over several decades in Sycamore Row and A Time for Mercy, where readers witnessed the character grow older and bear the burden of a town that never fully overcame its divisions.
What’s intriguing—and perhaps underestimated—is how consciously Grisham has grown outside of the courtroom. The 2001 book A Painted House reads almost like it was written by a different author. It follows a seven-year-old boy on a cotton farm in Arkansas during harvest season and is quiet, rural, and autobiographical in style. No attorneys are present. Not a conspiracy. Just childhood, hard work, and the unique sadness of a place gradually disappearing. Some readers who came looking for another legal thriller were perplexed by what is still considered to be one of his best novels.
A similar restlessness was evident in the Camino Island series. The show, which was set in a Florida beach town with a rare bookstore at its center, combined elements of a thriller with something more akin to literary mystery, with more atmosphere and character and less courtroom procedure. With a 13-year-old protagonist navigating issues that most adults find intractable, the Theodore Boone series, which is geared toward younger readers, suggested that Grisham approach legacy in a different way.
It’s still unclear if any contemporary writer has been able to maintain his position at the top of bestseller lists for so many years in a row. After a while, a figure like 300 million copies sold ceases to make intuitive sense. However, Grisham’s description of his process—six months per book, annually, without fail, and frequently beginning a new manuscript the day after finishing the previous one—has an almost homegrown feel. The factory is operating, so to speak, and the output continues to find readers in living rooms, airports, and hospital waiting rooms worldwide.
There seems to be more to Grisham’s longevity than just his adeptness at plotting. His novels frequently support common people trapped in oppressive systems. Typically, the clients are outnumbered. Most of the time, the institutions are uncaring or corrupt. And sometimes, inexplicably, justice still shows up—beaten, tardy, but present. It’s probably worthwhile to inquire as to whether that indicates optimism or just sound business sense. It could be both.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.