John Grisham, introduced by David Rubenstein in C-SPAN’s America’s Book Club, traces his rise from Arkansas poverty—son of a cotton farmer turned heavy machinery salesman—to a bestselling author after 15 rejections of A Time to Kill (1989), which sold just 882 copies at first. The Firm (1991), inspired by a law school idea and his wife’s red-pen edits, debuted at #11 on the NYT list after a Hollywood bidding war triggered by a bootleg copy. Now balancing fiction—like The Widow, his first true mystery—and nonfiction exposing 40,000–200,000 wrongful convictions in the U.S., Grisham’s disciplined 1,000-word daily routine and classic influences (Faulkner, Twain) reveal how storytelling thrives on precision, even amid systemic flaws. [Automatically generated summary]
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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.
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?
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.
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 a thousand.
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?
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 it 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.
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'd made in 10 years of practicing law.
Back in those days, and 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'm going 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.
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 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 1,000 words a day for five days a week for six months with the goal of finishing by July the 1st.
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?
Or do you know exactly what's going to happen at the end when you start?
It's patterned after Presumed Innocent that Scott Toreau 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 then Scott and I are friends.
I've told this story to him many times.
But Presumed Innocent was this huge, huge book 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?
And it's just, 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 fictional town in Virginia, two hours, hour and a half west of here.
And 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 lawyers do that.
I've read about lawyers who do that.
I never could.
I never had a rich client, Dave.
I never had, where were you back then when I needed 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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, 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?
And 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 prepare food for the wintertime.
So I got a really strong dose of what their lives had been like when I wrote that book.
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.
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, whatever, you know.
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.
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, you know, 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 don't, 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 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 were on the board of the Innocence Project and another one, Centurion Ministries, I started meeting a lot of the exonerees, people who had served 15, 20 years for a crime they didn't commit when the real killer is still loose.
I met these people after they had 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, you know, interest stories.
And so last year I said, I'm going to put together my 10 favorite wrongful conviction stories, and I published Framed.
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're at 10%.
That's between, what, 40 and 200,000 people.
There's a lot of them.
And 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.
So when you write a book, what you're trying to do is persuade somebody of what you think or entertain them.
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?
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 decided not to do it.
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?
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.
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.
But if you're a student or a regular person, 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.
They bought 300 books, six maps, and then they basically what they did is they bought them in the library.
Congress was 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 in the 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 of 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.