The Write Stuff - John Grisham
"Writers don't need love - all they require is money," said playwright John Osbourne. But these authors seem to have plenty of both.
John Grisham - £60 million
"I blew my chances because I wasn't very good." John Grisham, legal eagle turned best selling author, isn't talking about either law or writing here, but baseball, one of his favourite sports.
Grisham's childhood dream was to play pro ball, but he admits that he just didn't have the talent.
Fortunately, what Grisham lost on the diamond he turned into gold on the presses. He started writing as a hobby, squeezed in before going to the office and in courtroom recesses during his 10 year law career. In 1984 Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a 12 year old rape victim, and was inspired to explore in a novel what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants. Three years later he finished A Time To Kill, which was rejected by many publishers before finally getting a 5,000 copy run.
John Grisham's next novel, The Firm, spent 47 weeks on The New York Times best seller list and became the best selling novel of 1991. The film rights were sold to Paramount Pictures for $600,000.
The subsequent triumphant successes of The Pelican Brief and The Client made Grisham's name synonymous with modern legal thriller.
John Grisham lives a quiet life with his wife Renee and their two children. "I'm on easy street now," he says. "I have the luxury of writing basically five or six months out of the year. That's a lot of downtime."
