CSPAN - America's Book Club John Grisham

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Nov. 29, 2025 02:00-03:00 - CSPAN

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America's Book Club John Grisham

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		From the nation's iconic libraries, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified		Now from the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, author of more than 50 number one bestsellers, Master of the Legal Thriller, John Grisham.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So, let me ask you my first question, which is, in your wildest dreams, did you ever imagine that a lawyer, trained as a lawyer, would someday become the best-selling author of fiction works in the United States?
		You've now written more than 50 books that are number one bestsellers.
		When you first started writing books, did you ever imagine that you would achieve that kind of success?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I had no idea what I was doing when I started.
		It was a part-time hobby.
		I had never written anything before I started writing the first novel.
		I was a very busy small-town lawyer in Mississippi.
		I was a member of the state legislature.
		My wife was having babies.
		Life was pretty crazy, and I had no time to really devote to any new hobby.
		I was also, after a few years in the trenches, pretty disillusioned with the law.
		And I realized then that you couldn't make a lot of money as a small town lawyer.
		And I started, I had the idea of trying to write detective novels or police procedurals or legal stories to try to publish a novel and maybe another one and maybe expand the readership.
		And maybe after a few books, I could have some more income, which I desperately needed.
		And it didn't happen that way.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, your first book was called A Time to Kill.
		Right.
		And how many publishers turned that down?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, all of them did.
		They deny it now.
		But no, there were about 15 publishers and about 15 agents said no.
		They wrote me, you know, rejection letters.
		My secretary was sent out their submissions.
		This is 1987, before the internet.
		And it was a classic submission rejection, submission rejection.
		send in two or three chapters, they send it right back.
		And I played that game.
		It was kind of fun being rejected all those many times.
		The first rejection letter I got was from a senior editor at Doubleday.
		I've been with Double Day for 35 years now.
		And it was a personal note written by this senior editor.
		He said some nice things about the book, A Time to Kill, but said no.
		And I was so excited to get this rejection letter that I ran out to the office.
		I ran home and I showed it to my wife.
		I said, look, what a wonderful rejection letter.
		And she said, the guy said no, John.
		He said, no, he's not going to publish your book.
		I thought it was real progress.
		So I went through the rejections thing, you know, 15 agents and about 15 publishers.
		And finally, an agent called one day and said, I want to represent you.
		And that was a big deal.
		April the 15th, 1987.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And did you have to pay him to represent you or he was willing to do it on a commission?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I commissioned.
		I didn't have any money.
		I couldn't pay him.
		He took, I think, 10% or 15%.
		I didn't care.
		And I sent him a manuscript of the rest of The Time to Kill.
		He had the first three chapters.
		And it was about a thousand pages long.
		It was a mess, okay?
		Because I didn't know what I was doing.
		And he took the manuscript.
		And when I sent it to him, I sent the whole thing to him by FedEx.
		And I waited till like 11 o'clock, you know, the next morning.
		And I called his office.
		I said, hey, did you get the book?
		And he said, yeah, don't call me every day, okay?
		I'm going to give you some advice.
		Listen to me.
		You start writing the next book, okay?
		By the time you are finished with it, I will have sold this one.
		Plus, it'll keep you busy, and you won't be calling me every day.
		And it was great advice.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So your first book, did he actually get that sold?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he went back to everybody who'd already said no, and they said no again.
		And then he found a very small, unknown publishing company, brand new startup in New York, and they bought the book, and they published it in June of 89.
		They printed 5,000 hardback copies, and I bought 1,000.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And how many were sold?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, I finally sold 1,000.
		In my little town, hometown outside of Memphis, there was not a good bookstore.
		We had a nice library.
		So I went to the librarian.
		I said, hey, buddy, let's have a book party.
		I've never done this before, but let's figure it out.
		And I'll bring all these books in, because I got 1,000.
		And we'll have a big pile of books.
		I want all my friends.
		I grew up here, okay?
		These people had elected me to the state legislature.
		Family, friends, I knew everybody in town.
		And I thought I was very popular.
		And I said, well, have us a big book signing.
		We have photographs of my kids who were six and three climbing on a thousand copies of A Time to Kill, just stacked up everywhere.
		And we had a big party.
		And when the party was over, I still owned 882 copies of A Time to Kill.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now they're pretty valuable.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, but I had an invoice coming to pay for the things.
		And so I went back to the librarian.
		I was so depressed.
		I said, hey, pal, I can take this show on the road.
		Do you have any other buddies in the library business?
		And he said, sure.
		So 35 libraries later, I finally sold all of the copies of A Time to Kill.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You've sold those, but at the time you were working on selling them, were you writing your next book?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I was writing, yeah.
		I'd take his advice and I had the idea for the next book, an idea that I'd had since law school, and an idea that my wife had always liked.
		And I sent my agent a two-page summary of the firm early on, and his reaction was very positive, just like my wife.
		She said, this could be a big book.
		And I was still partial to the first one that was not selling.
		But I was also working on the Time to Kill took three years to write.
		Again, at 5 o'clock in the morning, I got in the habit of writing every morning.
		So the firm came right after it.
		And so both books took five years to write back to back.
		And by then, I was very much in the habit of writing every morning.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So the firm sold roughly 7 million copies or probably more than that now.
		And it became the number one New York Times bestseller.
		So when you heard that, were you in shock that a book that you had just written became the number one New York Times bestseller or you kind of thought it deserved it?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, sure, I thought it deserved it.
		I mean, you know, it's great.
		It's a great work of literature.
		No, we were in total shock.
		By the time the firm was published, we had sold the movie rights to Paramount.
		We had sold all the foreign rights, which we kept, language by language around the world.
		That went on the whole year.
		And so by the time the book finally came out in March of 1991, there was a lot of pressure behind it, a lot of buzz in the business, as they say.
		And it came out of the gate real fast and hit the New York Times list at number 11 on March 17th, 1991.
		And I remember that, obviously, back in those days, again, pre-internet, for a new young rookie to hit the bestseller list in a big way was a big deal.
		And it was a lot of publicity.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So who played the part in the movie?
		In other words, before the book came out, you already sold it to some famous actors.
		Is that right, or they agree to play?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		No, they'll sold it to Paramount.
		Just after the Time to Kill was published and flopped, I finally finished the firm.
		I sent it to New York, and there was no real interest in it.
		It kind of languished in some of the copy rooms back then.
		And back in those days, most of your big studios had scouts in New York who would scout the literary areas listening for good books that might be adapted.
		And unknown to us, and my agent being us, a copy, a bootleg copy showed up in Hollywood.
		And this guy got it in Hollywood and he made like 25 copies of it and sent to all the studios and production companies.
		We didn't know it.
		And he got nervous when he started making offers and it got really heated.
		And at the last minute, somebody said, hey, what about Grisham?
		What does the writer think about this?
		And my agent said, oh, I forgot to tell him.
		So they called me on a Sunday morning in January of 1990.
		And my agent said, Sunday morning now, he said, I need your authority to take the highest offer from Disney, Paramount, or Universal for the film rights to the firm.
		I said, we haven't sold the book rights to the firm.
		He said, I can't talk to you right now.
		We're in a hurry.
		These studios are sitting by their phones for the final round of bidding.
		And the word bidding had a nice ring to it.
		And I thought, okay, just can you tell me what's going on?
		He said, it's a lot of money.
		And that was it.
		And so he called back a couple hours later and said, we just sold the film rights to the firm to Paramount for more money than I've made in 10 years of practicing law.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		After you heard that, how long after that did you quit the practice a lot?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		About 15 minutes.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What did you tell to your law partners?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I didn't have a partner.
		I had a part-time secretary, and it was, I walked out of the office without even turning off the lights.
		I just walked.
		I said, I'm out of here.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I'm done.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What about some clients that were the best?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		All those people.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I didn't have many clients exactly.
unidentified		I got rid of them.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		They weren't paying me anyway.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So now you've written more than 50 number one bestsellers in the New York Times.
		I don't know of any other author that's done that, but very often when I've talked to authors, they get what's called writer's block.
		They write a book and then they can't write another one.
		In fact, some of the greatest authors ever wrote a first book and they never wrote a second book.
		I think Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind, never wrote another book.
		Lee Harper wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and while she was alive, another book never came out.
		Ralph Ellison, I think, wrote really only one book.
		So if they wrote The Invisible Man.
		So you don't have writer's block, obviously.
		It never occurred to you that after the first book didn't do so well, the second book does well.
		Do you have any problem writing a third book or you thought, you know, it was lucky the second time?
		Or did you just keep writing and use the style you already had?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		When the firm came out and became a big success, they hustled me back to New York for kind of the victory lap.
		And that included a spot on NBC Today Show with Brian Gumbel.
		That was a big deal in 1991.
		Brian was by far the biggest.
		And Brian agreed to do the interview.
		And that was, again, that was a lot of attention.
		And during that victory lap, we were having lunch with some executives with Walden Books somewhere in Manhattan.
		And this young executive said, he made this statement.
		He just threw it out there.
		He said, oh, the big guys come out every year.
		I never thought about that.
		I mean, I've always read a lot of books, a lot of popular fiction.
		I'd never thought about the fact that the big guys come out every year.
		He said, oh, yeah, look at Clancy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Robert Loveland.
		All your big commercial writers come out every year.
		And I thought, I didn't really, I didn't play Dom.
		I thought, well, that's intriguing.
		I hustled back home and I finished the Pelican Brief in 45 days.
		And it's been a book of your ever since.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And you were writing the Pelican brief.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Did you write it with the idea that Julia Roberts was going to play the role she ultimately played?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, sort of.
		Back in those days, and again, this is 30 years ago when they used to adapt my books.
		I haven't had a movie made now in 20 years.
		And I'm actively in the game trying to make it happen.
		It's not happening.
		When they sold the firm, we talked to some executive at Paramount.
		He said, we're going after Tom Cruise.
		He said, don't get excited.
		You never get who you want because they're busy or whatever.
		I had sent a two or three page summary of the Pelican brief as I was writing it to my agent who leaked it to a Hollywood director named Alan Pakula, a very famous director.
		Alan read the outline and said, I want to buy this.
		He said, I want to buy it for Julia Roberts.
		And I hadn't even finished the book.
		So we were thinking along those same lines at that time.
		And we got lucky and got her.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So talk about, if you can, the writing process.
		Some writers write a couple pages a day, they say they're done.
		Some say they write until they just can't think anymore.
		Some do it different ways.
		Some write longhand, some by computers.
		What is your process by which you can write a book a year and how do you do it?
		And are you very regimented in the way you do it or very haphazard?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's no formula to it.
		I hear people say it's a formula.
		It's not really a formula.
		There are a lot of stories.
		Even though I stopped practicing law, I still am intrigued by the law.
		I love stories about law firms and big-time flamboyant trial lawyers and litigation and trials and courts and appeals.
		And that's where I kind of live.
		That's my area of interest.
		So I'm always reading, not researching, but just pleasure reading about those issues.
		And when you watch lawyers, the material is endless, okay?
		There's just a lot of material and a lot of good stories that I've just got stacked up and issues.
		I've just, you know, I collect magazine articles and even books about all different types of issues.
		So there's no, so far, there's no writer's block.
		So far, the problem is I start a book every year on January the 1st.
		That's a rule.
		I've had that for a long time.
		I'll make myself start.
		And toward the end of the year, I start thinking about what's the next book.
		What's the best idea I have for the next book?
		And so far, there have been always several ideas, two or three ideas.
		And then I'll pick the best idea on January the 1st, and I'll write a thousand words a day for five days a week for six months with the goal of finishing by July the 1st.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And do you write in Longhand or computer?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		No, I wrote A Time to Kill in Longhand, and I wrote half of the firm in Longhand.
		But this is 1988.
		By the time I was halfway through the firm, I bought one of the first generation Olivetti little word processors with a tiny screen.
		And so I finished the book on a word processor and that's all computer.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So I've often wondered, fiction writers, when they start a book, do they really know how it's going to end or do they kind of make it up as they go along?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Or do you know exactly what's going to happen at the end when you start?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I have certain rules about writing popular fiction.
		And one of the rules I'm certain about is I never write the first scene until I know the last scene.
		John Irving is a hero of mine.
		I love his books.
		And we were doing an interview in Toronto a few years ago.
		And I asked him, I said, is it true that you said, you have said, you write the last sentence before the first sentence?
		He said, that's true.
		I'm not that smart, but I know the final scene.
		I know what's going.
		When you write suspense and mystery and thrillers, you better know where you're going.
		It goes fast.
		And if you always know the ending, it's hard to get lost.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you're writing, you write from, let's say, 9 to 12.
		At 12, you say, I'm done.
		And I go have lunch.
		I go downtown.
		What do you do after the rest of the day?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I start about 7.30 in a little office behind the main house where we live on a farm.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You take calls or you interrupt.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You're allowed to be interrupted.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		The office has no phones, no fax, no internet.
		Remember the facts?
		Remember the fax machine?
		No music, no interruptions.
		I still love the 7.30 to 9 o'clock early hours.
		That's very, very productive.
		I go back and forth to the house.
		There's a laptop in the house.
		It's online.
		I don't work online without a fear of thievery.
		But I write three or four hours pretty, you know, with a lot of enthusiasm.
		And when you do that, after four hours, your brain, my brain's pretty well mush.
		I got to take a break.
		I go do something physical, go to the gym, go play golf.
		I have an office downtown in Charlottesville, and I go there to do the business end of it, interviews and things like that.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you write to, I say, July 1.
		You're done by July 1.
		Do you then send it off to the editor and the editor actually edit you or no editor edits you because you've written 50 number one bestsellers?
		What are they going to tell you that you don't already know?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's one reason I've written 50 number one bestsellers because I still have a great editor and I listen to him.
		He's my agent.
		He's been my agent for 30 years, but David Gernert published my first five books as a junior editor at Doubleday and we've been together for 35 years.
		And so he works on the books.
		He edits the books.
		My wife is my first reader and she's brutal.
		I mean, she's really, she loves to read with a red pen and make all sorts of smart ass comments on the margins.
		She really enjoys that.
		And so we have big fights over the fiction.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But you've been married 44 years, so it must be okay.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		44 years.
		Things are working out okay.
		When our kids were small, they would hear us yelling.
		You know, kids love to see their parents fight.
		So they would come running into the kitchen and realize it was just a book fight.
		Not a real fight, but just a book fight.
		We have some very enthusiastic conversations, but she's usually right.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So I notice a lot of your books, in fact, most of them, use the word the at the beginning.
		Is that the secret to your success?
		Because the first book you wrote used the word ah, a time to kill.
		If you had said the time to kill, would it have been successful?
unidentified		Sure.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I screwed up big time.
		No kidding, this is a true story.
		When I wrote the firm, I didn't have a title for it.
		And to me, the firm was just a working title.
		I sent the book off to New York.
		The firm, I said, that's not going to last.
		Looking back, you know, it's hard to believe.
		When that worked so well, I want to use the brief for the Pelican brief to get even shorter, but for some reason, I couldn't do that.
		Then the client, the chamber of the appeal, here we go all the way down.
		And so titles are very difficult.
		I would love to have the great titles.
		You mentioned a few of them.
		The good titles have been used.
		To kill a mockingbird, the grapes of rat, in cold blood.
		Think about it.
		All the great titles are gone.
		I can't.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		So I'm stuck with the.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I'm stuck with the widow.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, as we talk, you have another book coming out called The Widow.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And can you tease us a little bit about what it's about or it's a secret?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, it's not a secret.
		It's the first mystery.
		It's the first time I've written a true mystery.
		Not who done it, but did he do it.
		It's patterned after Presumed Innocent that Scott Thoreau published in 1987, which is a huge book.
		I read it then, and it had a huge impact on me as a writer to get off my rear end and finish my first novel.
		And Scott and I are friends.
		I've told this story to him many times.
unidentified		But Presumed Innocent was this huge, huge book.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		The same summer with Bonfire of the Vanities.
		So it was a good summer for readers.
		But it was a classic, The Lawyer Was on Trial for Murder.
		Did he do it?
		It's brilliant.
		One of my favorite books.
		And I've thought about that over the years.
		I'd like to try that myself one of these days.
		And so The Widow is a story of Somebody I know very well, a typical small town lawyer in a town in fictional town in Virginia, two hours, hour and a half west of here.
		And he's he's not, his practice is not doing very well.
		He's been hammering away for 18 years.
		And he has a client come in one day, a widow, who wants a new will.
		And she has no family, not many friends.
		She's very private.
		And he's figuring, you know, $100 for a cheap will.
		Turns out she's got a lot of money.
		A lot of money.
		And nobody knows it but him.
		And so he starts thinking of ways he might, you know, ethically crank up some business with her and make some bigger fees.
		And so.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Lawyers do that?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I've read about lawyers who do that.
		I never could.
		I never had a rich client, David.
		I never had.
		Where were you back then?
		I need a real wealthy client.
		I never had one.
		So he starts doing all kinds of things he shouldn't do.
		And a year later, he goes to trial for her murder.
		That's a tease.
		He's accused of murdering.
		He goes to trial for her murder a year later.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, we'll find out what happened when the book comes out.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Go buy the book.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So let's talk about your own background.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Where were you born?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Jonesboro, Arkansas.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And your family did what?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		What did your father and mother do?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		My father was a cotton farmer the first seven years of my life.
		Life on the farm was very difficult.
		And we picked cotton and chopped cotton like the other kids, and it was not any fun.
		And each year, my father got deeper and deeper in debt.
		And the most important decision, most important moment in my life, was when I was seven years old, and my parents decided to flee the farm in the middle of the night.
		It got us away from that lifestyle.
		It got us into a better world.
		And so my father got a job as a bulldozer operator for a construction company, a good company.
		It moved us around every summer to a different town for a different job.
		And that was a great part of my wonderful childhood, great parents, big family, all that kind of stuff.
		But by the time I was probably 15, things had improved dramatically.
		My father was selling heavy machinery and doing very well.
		But the first few years were rough.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So your interest was not in being a writer at the time, I assume.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You were interested in something more important, being a baseball player.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I mean, that was in those days back in the early 60s.
		The Cardinal baseball game was on, we never missed a game.
		It was on the radio somewhere.
		If we were in the house, it was on the kitchen counter.
		If we were in the car, it was on the radio.
		I have vivid memories of playing Little League Baseball hot summer nights in these small towns where the whole town shows up for the game.
		And there would be several transistor radios.
		You could hear them all over the place.
		There'd be one in our dugout.
		And we always knew the Cardinal score.
		We always knew the game, who was ahead.
		We knew all the other players.
		That was just a way of life.
		My father idolized Stan Musual.
		My grandfather listened to the Cardinals, Dizzy Dean, and the gas house gang in the 1930s and 40s with the first radio he ever owned.
		There was not much electricity.
		So it was kind of a family tradition.
		And I, like all the kids on my street, I dreamed of playing the Cardinals.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So were you a pretty good player in Little League?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		No, I couldn't hit.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I was afraid of the ball.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But did you play in high school?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I was an average high school player.
		I tried to play in college.
		I played one year in junior college, set the bench, and I realized I couldn't trust my future to a coach that stupid, so I had to transfer out.
		I went to a bigger school, and I was actually on the field trying out as a walk-on one day in an inner squad game when I faced a pitcher throwing 90 miles an hour.
		Now, that's no big deal nowadays, okay?
		It looks easy on television, right?
		Until you've seen that and experienced that, it's terrifying.
		And I ran for the dugout, and then the coach cut me the next day.
		That was the end of my career.
		And I was kind of glad to be done with it because I didn't want to see a fastball again.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, home, you ever called up that coach and thanked him?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Because if you had played baseball, you wouldn't be a great writer.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		We became buddies.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's a great old guy.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you ultimately went to college where at Mississippi State, and then you went to law school at University of Mississippi?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		O Miss, yeah.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		O Miss.
		Okay, that's different than University of Mississippi?
		Yes, same as the mission.
		Okay.
		And then you got a, you practiced law for how many years?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Only 10 years.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		10.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And but you also ran for the state legislature?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		When I was 28, I got elected to the state legislature as a Democrat in the state house at 28, which should be against the law in every state to be 28 years old.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And did you think at that time if you worked well, you could become a statewide officer, governor, or attorney general or something?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		There were some, naturally, when you're that young, you have dreams of maybe a career in politics.
		But one thing I realized immediately, I was not cut out for constituent service.
		Once you get elected, I beat an incumbent.
		I got 65% of the vote.
		It was a big turnout, big landslide.
		Well, I didn't realize it, but once I got elected, everybody voted for me, 100%, okay?
		And they all wanted something.
		They wanted jobs.
		They wanted birth certificates.
		They wanted this.
		They wanted that.
		I didn't have a staff.
		We didn't have staff in those days.
		And so the constituent service was really got to be something I didn't like.
		My second year in the legislature in 1985, the school teachers had a wildcat strike.
		They walked out because they were the lowest paid teachers in the country.
		I grew up hearing teachers complain about that in Mississippi.
		And they all went to came to Jackson and marched on the Capitol.
		And we were, you know, in the Capitol holed up, looking out the windows.
		We were kind of scared.
		And I went home that weekend, and I didn't want to go home.
		They were waiting on me at home.
		They caught me at church.
		They caught me in the grocery store.
		It was just all this constant, you know, polite, but at the same time, concerned.
		And I thought, you know, I really don't enjoy these constituents.
		I reached the point where I really didn't like the voters.
		And when you're a politician, when you reach that point, it's time to quit.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So probably.
		I don't know if everybody has that same view, but maybe they should.
		So, okay, so you decided to get out of politics.
		You're getting out of practice law.
		The writing career is working.
		How has your life changed?
		In other words, now that you're a very successful author, are people coming to you all the time for investments or coming to you all the time for book ideas or with book ideas?
		How has your life changed?
		And where do you actually live now?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		We moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, 31 years ago to live for one year.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And why there?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		It's a great place to be.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I just fell in love with it.
		It's a great place to live.
		It's a college town, beautiful country.
		We love university towns.
		And our son went to UVA.
		Our daughter went to UNC.
		So it's very much, after 30 years, it's home.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and your wife went to Utermana?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		She's at Tar Hill, yeah.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You're a Dookie.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Do you go back between Chapel Hill and Charlottesville and principally?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		We have a house in Chapel Hill three hours away.
		We go to every UNC Tar Hill basketball game there.
		We go to every UVA home game in Charlottesville.
		So from January through March, it's all basketball.
		I'm getting kind of tired of it.
		My wife's a die-hard Tar Hill fan.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever been to Cameron Indoor Stadium?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		One time, I'll never go back.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Really?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		It's the worst place in the world.
		It was a Carolina game, and I don't know how many years ago.
		And Duke won.
		I don't know, Duke won by one point.
		And the last 30 seconds were, it was absolute bedlam.
		My ears rang for a week.
		And I said, if I ever get out of here, I'm not going back.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, you have two children, and are they interested in being writers?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		My son has kind of followed my footsteps.
		He's practiced law now for 12 years in Charlottesville.
		UVA undergrad, went to law school to an old miss like me.
		He's kind of rethinking the law practice.
		Now he's got two kids.
		He would like to write, but he's never been one to ask me for advice or follow my advice, which is okay.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I have children like that.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You know what it's like.
		Maybe a little bit, but not much.
		My daughter, no, my daughter's a school teacher in Raleigh, and she loves what she does, and she has two kids down there.
		So they're probably not going to be writers.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so today you spend your time writing and some exercising.
		You play golf and you watch basketball.
		You don't play basketball, I assume, at this point.
		So for somebody that's watching this and wants to be John Grisham, a great writer, sells lots of books, what is your advice about how somebody can learn how to be a great writer?
		What is the secret to it, if there is one secret or several words of advice?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You know, I hate to give advice because it's easy to give and even easier to ignore.
		I tell aspiring writers certain things.
		First of all, you've got to have a real career.
		Nobody graduates from college and starts writing for a living unless you're working for a newspaper or a magazine.
		But you've got to find a career that is emotionally and financially satisfying, and you can pursue that career.
		And you have to live a little bit.
		You got to get beat up.
		You got to travel.
		You got to get hurt.
		You got to have some success.
		You got to live before you know what to write about.
		And treat the fiction like I did as a serious hobby.
		Anybody can find an hour a day.
		Until you're writing it one page a day every day, nothing's going to happen.
		Writers love to talk about what they want to write or what they're writing or this or that.
		Don't talk your book to death.
		Get an idea, the best idea you've got for any kind of idea, whatever you want to write about.
		Outline it.
		Get your story down as perfect as you can and write at least one page a day.
		Sometimes that takes 15 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour.
		You can do it late at night during lunch or whenever.
		Scott Toreau wrote Presumed Innocent on the train every morning from community from into Chicago.
		He had his seat on the train.
		He sat down every morning for three years and he wrote Presumed Innocent.
		It takes that type of discipline to do it, but you got to do it every day.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So today, if somebody wants to be a writer, your advice is start writing and eventually maybe some life experiences will turn out to be okay.
		Not every writer will.
		But in your case, did your parents live to see your enormous success?
		Did both of them live to see that?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		I published a book called A Painted House about 20 years ago.
		No lawyers in it.
		No lawyers.
		Kind of a glorified childhood memoir of life on the cotton farm, tons of Cardinal baseball.
		That was me when I was seven years old.
		And I wrote that book then.
		I think it was the first non-legal thriller I've written.
		And I wanted to write the book because all my life I'd heard these stories told by my father and my grandfather and my uncles about these crazy tales of living on the farm, growing up in rural Arkansas and all this whole family history.
		And I wanted to record that and moralize that.
		And so I started writing the book.
		I told my parents I relied on them heavily.
		For example, who had the first television in Black Oak, Arkansas?
		Who had the first telephone?
		How did my grandmother, when she canned peaches, I recall her doing that?
		She canned peaches and tomatoes.
		How did she do that?
		Now, my mom walked me through all that stuff.
		My dad talked about life on the farm, and they grew all their own food.
		They had to.
		They were farmers.
		Everything but coffee, sugar, and tea or something.
		They had to feed, they had to prepare food for the wintertime.
		So I got a really strong dose of what their lives had been like when I wrote that book.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		When you were a young boy, did you read a lot yourself, or reading wasn't that big a passion for you at that time?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		My mother did not like television, even back in the early 1960s.
		And so we didn't want, we watched some, but not much.
		As we moved from town to town.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		That was before C-SPAN started, right?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Long before cable.
		Long before streaming.
		We moved from town to town.
		Oftentimes we got there too late to sign up for Little League, but my brothers and my sister and I could judge the quality of life in any small town by two things.
		The number of books you could check out at the local library per week and the quality of the Little League baseball field.
		And we would take stacks of books home for the library.
		My mother would always take us to the library and pass them around.
		And my mom would read to us and my mom push reading.
		So yeah, it was a very, you know, idyllic childhood.
		You know, we didn't realize we were that poor, but we didn't care.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So as an adult, what authors have you been most fascinated by or most impressed by?
		And who do you read now when you're not reading John Grisham's books?
		Whose books do you read?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You know, I get this question all the time and I have no good answer.
		I read a lot of nonfiction stuff I wouldn't recommend to anybody.
		It's books about the criminal justice system.
		It's studies of wrongful convictions, death penalty, mass incarceration, things like that.
		That's for my interest.
		Supreme Court cases, opinions.
		I see a lot of that stuff.
		And I've learned over the years, I really have to watch myself reading fiction when I'm writing fiction because we all want to read the great writers.
		And if I do that when I'm writing, I catch myself doing things I wouldn't normally do.
		Just little words or phrases or longer sentences or shorter sentence or whatever, you know.
		I just catch myself.
		So I try to lay off the fiction.
unidentified		But I've read a lot of, I read a lot of people.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Probably more Mark Twain than anybody else.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I still love Mark Twain.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And if you're from Mississippi, I assume Faulkner.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, every there's a state law you have to read Faulkner.
		In every high school English teacher thinks she can explain the sound and the fury, and nobody can explain it because Faulkner wasn't even sure what it was.
		We struggle with Faulkner.
		I still struggle with Faulkner.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Love Steinbeck.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Love Steinbeck.
		I had a great high school English teacher my senior year, and we were plowing through Faulkner, but she had mercy on us, and she let us read Steinbeck.
		And the first book was called Tortilla Flat, and I was a big jock football player.
		I thought I was a stud, and I wouldn't admit this in class, but I waited till after class, and I said, hey, I really like this Tortilla Flat.
		She said, okay, read this one.
		It's Cannery Row.
		Read this one, Mice and Men.
		So she took me through all the Steinbeck's books, and she saved the best for last with The Grapes of Brath.
		When I read that, I thought, this is magic.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So most great writers of fiction don't write nonfiction as a general rule of thumb.
		There's some exceptions, of course.
		You write nonfiction as well as fiction.
		Is it harder to write nonfiction or harder to write fiction?
		And your subjects of your nonfiction book have often been legal-related subjects as well.
		And I'll deal with one of them in a moment, the question of innocence and so forth when people are convicted.
		But let's talk about the difference between writing nonfiction and fiction.
		What's harder for you or what's more enjoyable for you?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I much prefer the fiction because the nonfiction takes much work.
		There's a lot of research to do and you have to get it right.
		And you have to be accurate.
		With fiction, I'm not known for my accuracy.
		I just make stuff up, okay?
		And if they catch a mistake, I don't care.
		You fictionalize anything, but the nonfiction is, and these cases are still active.
		People are still alive.
		And I portray certain people in a bad way because they were bad people or did bad things.
		And so you're always concerned about offending someone.
		So yeah, I wrote one nonfiction book 20 years ago, The Innocent Man.
		I had no idea what I was doing.
		I'm not a journalist, but I love the story.
		And I wrote that book, and I said, I'll never do this again.
		It took 18 months.
		A novel takes six months.
		But the book did very well, and I got the idea.
		Once I got involved with Innocence work and we're on the board of the Innocence Project and another one, Centurion Ministries, I started meeting a lot of the exonerees, people who served 15, 20 years for a crime they didn't commit when the real killer is still loose.
		I met these people after they'd been exonerated, and they're very, very inspirational.
		And I realized every wrongful conviction should be its own book.
		The stories are so filled with drama and suffering and compelling interest stories.
		And so last year I said, I'm going to put together my 10 favorite wrongful conviction stories and I published Framed.
		And I said, no more nonfiction.
		No more nonfiction, never again.
		And now I'm writing another one.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you're on the Innocence Project Board.
		I think that's right.
		The Innocence Project became well known in the United States at its inception because they were helping O.J. Simpson.
		And some people say they were helpful in persuading the jury that the DNA evidence wasn't persuasive enough to convict him.
		Do you have any concerns about the O.J. Simpson conviction or not innocence verdict, I should say?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I think most people viewed that then and view it now as a bad verdict.
		That was not justice.
		But Berry Shek was in the courtroom.
		He was part of OJ's defense team.
		And that's about the time he and Peter Neufell started the Innocence Project because of DNA testing.
		DNA was in its infancy in 1994, early 90s.
		And Barry understood it.
		And Barry's role in the trial were trying to use DNA incorrectly.
		The police were.
		And because they just didn't know any better.
		They had not used it before.
		And Barry knew how to use it.
		And Barry pointed out to the jury what they were doing wrong with the DNA.
		I don't think he ever said, OJ Simpson to the jury it was innocent.
		I'm not sure he ever said that.
		He asked me to be on the board in 2006, I guess.
		So it was 10 years later.
		And we had a discussion about that.
		And he still, he had a black eye because of that.
		But for all the good they've done, though, the Innocence Project now is up to 375 DNA exonerations.
		These are amazing stories of people who would still be locked away had it not been for the Innocence Project.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So now you're one of the most successful authors in the world.
		You obviously have made some money doing this.
		You can do anything you want or you can do nothing.
		When you are not writing, what are your activities that you most enjoy?
		Is it being with your family?
		Is it playing golf?
		You have hobbies.
		Do you collect certain books or collect anything?
		What do you really enjoy doing?
		And what do you want to now do with the remaining 20, 30, 40 years of your life, however long you have left?
		Is there anything you particularly want to do that you haven't done yet?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's, you never want to reach a point in life where you say, I don't have any goals.
		You know, I can't say that.
		I can't see slowing down anytime soon.
		I don't work that hard.
		I have not worked 40 hours a week in the past 35 years, okay?
		I don't hit it real hard.
		A few hours a day and a few hours.
		It takes longer than six months, six months for the first draft, but then it takes another two or three months.
		And then in the fall, invariably I'll get bored and I'll write a sports book.
		I've written three or four of those.
		I've written seven kids' books and I've got that series.
		I'll get bored, you know, about this time of the year and write a short book, small book.
		I can't see, I have no desire to slow down because I'm not going, it looks fast, okay, but I'm not that, I'm not exhausted.
		I do play, I took up golf at the age of 55, which is total insanity for, you know, it's very frustrating.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So what's your handicap?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I'm not going to tell you.
		I don't even, hell, I don't even have one.
		I mean, I don't keep score.
		My wife and I enjoy travel.
		We enjoy the grandkids and feel very blessed to have four of those little guys and spend a lot of time with them.
		And it's all about family and friends.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And your siblings?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		You have several siblings?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Two brothers and two sisters.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Don't see much of them, but the family's always been pretty tight and they've scattered.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And do your friends always introduce you as the great John Grisham or they just treat you like another average person?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You know, David, if they did that, we wouldn't be friends.
		They know better.
		And they know we're grateful for the success.
		We don't, we low-key it.
		We don't, you know, it's a very normal life.
		And it's always been that way.
		We kept that way for our kids.
		It's still that way.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So you were a collector of books.
		You do collect books, right?
		And you collect, what's 20th century fiction?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		20th century American authors, mainly fiction, yeah.
		Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, William Steyron, Truman Capote, Philip Ross.
		I like the guys who, you know, are the writers, some are women.
		Just got a Flannery O'Connor short storybook.
		But there's several dealers.
		I like to play in that market.
		Several dealers who are always on the lookout.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So we're at the Library of Congress now.
		Have you spent much time here over the years?
		Have you ever been here before?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Been here before.
		I haven't spent time here.
		I trust.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Your books, you don't really do a lot of research because you're kind of making it up, right?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		My research is mainly Google, which is pretty amazing.
		You can learn a lot just by when I'm writing, I'll think of something I need to know.
		I have to look up and I keep a little small list.
		And I'll take a coffee break and run to the house and check it out.
		It's amazing what you, it's at your fingertips.
		We all know that.
		But it makes the research so much easier and my job easier.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And today, one of the great passions of your life is dealing with people who are wrongly convicted, I assume.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So would you say the people on death row in your observation are 99% are not wrongly convicted, maybe 1% are wrongly convicted?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if it's 1% or less.
		I get the question all the time, how many people in prison are wrongfully convicted?
		What's the number?
		Well, no one knows.
		We have about 2.3 million people behind bars, which is the highest rate of incarceration anywhere the world's ever seen.
		So we have, you know, way too many people in prison.
		No one can study the cases because there's just too many of them.
		But on one hand, you've got, you know, as low as 2% estimate.
		On the other hand, you have 10%.
		That's between, what, 40 and 200,000 people.
		There's a lot of them.
		Once I started meeting these people, there's a guy in Oklahoma.
		I wrote him a letter yesterday.
		He's been there for 40 years.
		And we've tried everything in the world to get him out and still came within one vote in front of the parole board a few years ago and lost that.
		And I still think about him every day.
		So I mean, these people, they're real and they're there and they're suffering.
		Like this guy in Texas is, I went to see him two weeks ago on death row in Texas and I talked to him and I thought, yeah, I cannot believe, I can't imagine what this guy's going through, counting the days down.
		And so I'm going to try to tell that story.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So when you write a book, what you're trying to do is persuade somebody of what you think or entertain them.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		When you write your fiction books, you have a message typically that you're trying to convey a message, but you're also trying to entertain people, I assume, right?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I write two types of books, the entertainments.
		And my wife is always saying, just get off your soapbox and write a good thriller.
		Stop preaching.
		I hear that a lot, by the way, from her.
		And she's right.
		So The Widow is a good old-fashioned legal thriller mystery suspense book.
		There's no, there's no, as I say, there's no redeeming social value to it.
		It's just good commercial fiction.
		But framed last year was wrongful convictions.
		The book next spring will be from Texas will be wrongful convictions.
		And then I got to take a break from wrongful convictions.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever thought of writing a book with your wife?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		No.
		Oh, God, no.
		It'd be worse than trying to play golf with my wife.
		I would never do that.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		I used to work in the White House for Jimmy Carter, and he later said that the only time he ever came close to getting divorced was when he and his wife were writing a book together.
		And they had so many fights that they ultimately decide not to do it.
		So I guess you're probably well advised.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't.
		I would, we've never even remotely considered that.
		It's not going to happen.
		No.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		But other well-known authors sometimes write books with other people.
		James Patterson wrote a book with Bill Clinton.
		Would you ever consider a famous person to be a co-author with you?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		I cannot imagine that happening.
		I like to write my own stuff.
		The book I published last fall, framed, it's 10 stories.
		I wrote five, and Jim McCloskey wrote five.
		A friend of mine, five of his cases, he's an innocence advocate.
		And we had a lot of fun picking the 10 cases, but I wrote mine and he wrote his and we published it together.
		I cannot see that happening again.
		It was a good experience, but I'd like to be in charge of all the material.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so I guess you're not going to write something with a private equity person as your co-author, right?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		No, but you could be a target.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		It could be.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		No doubt.
		I am many times.
		Look, you have been very generous with your time, and I want to congratulate you on being an inspiration to people that want to learn how to write books and enjoy reading books.
		And I can't imagine how anybody could write more than 50 number one New York Times bestsellers.
		It's staggering.
		Do you ever pinch yourself about having achieved all this?
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		You know, you get used to it after a number of years.
		You get really used to it.
		But I never take it for granted.
		They will call me in October, hopefully, late next month, and say, okay, the widow is on the list at number one.
		And that's always a big moment.
		I've never taken it for granted.
		One day it's not going to happen.
		One day it's not going to be there for whatever reason.
		And when that happens, again, my wife and I both grew up with very strong values and very good parents.
		And a long time ago, when life started going crazy, back in the early 90s with the books and movies on top of each other, and we were sort of blindsided.
		And we lost a lot of privacy that we really realized that we treasured.
		And we also had enough sense to say, look, this in popular culture, everything goes in cycles.
		I don't care if it's music, movies, fashion, food, sports, athletics, what you name it.
		It comes and goes, okay?
		All this is great right now.
		But one of these days it's going to go away.
		And when that happens, let's be able to say, hey, you know, it was a heck of a lot of fun.
		We enjoyed it to the max, but we kept our feet on the ground and we didn't change.
		And that's what we have done.
		And it has not been that difficult.
		We just, we enjoy each other, enjoy our kids and grandkids and our friends and live in a small town.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Congratulations on what you've achieved.
		If you ever change your mind on Cameron Indoor Stadium, let me know.
		If I can persuade you to go to Camden Yards and see a baseball game, maybe when the Cardinals are playing there, let me know.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, David.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		Thanks very much.
john grisham ▲ ● ▼		My pleasure.
unidentified		John Grisham and David Rubenstein visited the Library of Congress's main reading room and viewed some of the library's artifacts that related to Grisham's life and career.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		So if you want to go to sleep in Washington, D.C., this is the place to come.
		You can come here.
		Nobody bothers you.
		It's very quiet.
		I'll have a talk.
		And then you can sit here and sit there all day and just read your book.
		Probably the quietest place in Washington.
unidentified		Is it open to the public?
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		Anybody can come.
		But if you're a student or a regular person, you came in, you can request any book.
		And they have a pneumatic tube kind of system that would bring it to you eventually.
		See, when the Library of Congress was created, the idea for it was actually James Madison's.
		In 1783, at the Articles of Confederation Congress, he said, we should have a library for us so we know what we're doing here.
		They finally got around to it under the Constitution in 1800.
		Congress appropriated $5,000.
unidentified		They bought 300 books, six maps.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼		And then they, basically, what they did is they bought them in the Library of Congress, which then located in the Congress.
		When the British came in 1812, they burned the Capitol, and therefore they also burned the Library of Congress.
		So there were no books in the Library of Congress.
		So Thomas Jefferson had the biggest private collection in the United States.
		He offered to sell it to the Congress.
		He'd say, I have my books.
		You can take them now.
		I'll sell them to you at a fair value.
		Congress was upset about it.
		Why?
		Because he was not considered a Christian.
		He was considered a deist, believed in God, but not Christ.
		Therefore, they're afraid that his books would have some things that were not really appropriate for the Congress.
		It wouldn't be anti-Christian.
		So they read every single book, made sure every book was okay, and ultimately he sold it to them.
		I think for, I remember the price, I think it was maybe $20,000, some thousand dollars.
		And that became the core of the Library of Congress's collection.
		Then 1850s, there was a fire at the Library of Congress in the Capitol, and a large part of his collection was burned.
		So they've been over the years, they've been trying to replace it, not with the actual books, but ones that are replicas of them, and they pretty much have done that.
		And then over the years, when Congress said that you have to have a, if you want a copyright, you have to send two copies here.
		That began the enormous collection because everybody who writes a book has to send two copies here to get their copyright.
		And then they began collecting other things, maps, comic books, audiovisual things, and rare books.
		And so they have this incredible collection now, about 143 million items, which is in this building, one behind it, which is called the Adams Building.
		John Adams, this is Jefferson.
		And there's one where the James Madison won.
		And then there's one in Culpeper, Virginia for audiovisual things.
		Here's some of the treasures, I guess, they want to show us.
unidentified		We have a sort of a theme.
		This is the items from the manuscript division.
		And if you look down here, this is from Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman.
		He not only read a lot of Supreme Court opinions, but he read a lot of fiction.
		And you made his list.
		You see where the errors are.
		And he graded some of your books.
		While I'm nervous, you never got below a B plus.
		So if you the client got a B plus, and then here, the firm, you got an A. Melvin Brews A minus, Chambers A minus.
		Yes, and then you also got a Tom DeKille got an A minus.
		The firm got an A, and he was a hard grader, and he was also known to occasionally grade the other justices' opinions.
		So I think you should be proud he was not an easy grader.
		Wow.
		See more with John Grisham and the Library of Congress's archive on America's Book Club, The Treasures.
		Available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
		C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation.
		From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries and institutions comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet.
		Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story.
		Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system.
		Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life.
		Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres, reimagining food.
		Rita Dove, Hulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate.

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