1955-
Novelist

Publishing Superstar.

By far the best-selling author of the 1990s, John Grisham is perhaps, as his former agent Jay Garon declared, "the most successful author in the history of the book-publishing business."

Street Lawyer. Grisham did not set out to become a writer. Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, he was the son of a construction worker who continually moved his family around the Deep South. Grisham earned a law degree from the University of Mississippi and established a modest practice in Southaven, Mississippi, a town of twenty-five thousand just across the state line from Tennessee. After spending ten years practicing criminal and personal-injury law, Grisham admitted that his 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 [were] often compromised; and I could never bring myself to...