If you should drive about 50 miles south of Memphis on Interstate 55 along the edge of the fertile Mississippi delta, you might turn east on highway 6 through the hill country of north Mississippi made famous in the novel of William Faulkner, a Nobel laureate whose home has become an attraction for hundreds of literacy scholars each year.
You would be driving toward Oxford, the small town where leading figures of the New York publishing world descended to bury Faulkner in the summer of 1962. A few months later, President John. F. Kennedy ordered thousands of national Guardsmen to this university town when James Meredith was successfully challenging the segregationist policies of the state university by registering to attend Ole Miss, The University of Mississippi.
Oxford continues to nurture some of America’s greatest writers while trying to come to grips with its history of racial tension. Perhaps the most successful of today’s successors to Faulkner is John Grisham, a virtually unknown small-town lawyer until he made the bestseller list with The Firm. He has written five successful novels that have made the bestseller list and has become what Newsweek called a commercial supernova.
A Time to Kill originally sold 5,000 copies in hardback. It has sold 8 1/2 million in paper, and it was reissued in November of last year as a new hardback by Doubleday, which was not the regional publisher. The book has sold about 200,000 copies in that hardback edition.
The firm was released in March 1991 in hardback. It has sold around 600,000 copies in hardback and about 12 1/2 million in paperback.
Pelican Brief was published in March of 1992. It has sold around 1.4 million in hardback and right at 10 million in paperback.
The Client was published in March 1993. It has sold 2.9 million in hardback, and the paperback was released in March of this year.
Those are U.S. figures only. Figures are not available for sales in other nations nor are reports on The Chamber, his most recent book.
As one approaches the outskirts of Oxford, Grisham’s large farm dominates the rolling hills to the south. There he has written on a disciplined schedule, producing a novel a year and becoming a benefactor of many causes in the area.
Will Norton Jr., dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and former faculty member at Ole Miss, recently interviewed Grisham. The following pages contain an edited version of that interview:
Q: Has anyone else ever had the kind of record publishing that you have established in the last five years?
A: Every time Doubleday thinks I’ve broken a new record they’ll find that Stephen King set it five years ago. So I don’t know. It’s a lot of books real fast. I don’t know if anyone has ever sold this many books in a three-year period. It’s probably unlikely. The numbers are so big. They’re hard to keep up with and, to be frank, I don’t spend a lot of time tracking the numbers. Doubleday will send me a printout every six months of the current books in print.
Q: Some analyses of your books say they’re about greed. What are they about?
A: They’re about lawyers. I don’t know if the two go hand in hand. All the books are different. They al have legal setting. I was lawyer for 10 years, so I write about what I know. The Firm would be the only book that is about greed, and it would not be about greed for all the lawyers involved.
The books are about people. I take normal people, all of whom happen to be lawyers, and they get in stressful situations and try to get out of them. It’s not a magic formula.
Q: Are there real experiences or real people or real places in your books?
A: yes. Especially in A Time to Kill. It was somewhat autobiographical. A small town lawyer is struggling to get ahead. I don’t use real people because I don’t want to get sued. I use some real places.
The Firm obviously had a good deal of Memphis in it. Pelican Brief was set in New Orleans and Washington.
The client was back in Memphis. As far as real life experiences, probably not – except for the first book.
Q: How did you learn to write?
A: it wasn’t something I’d always wanted to do. It came late in life. I never dreamed of being a writer when I was a kid or even when I was a student. When I was a third-year law student at ole Miss in 1980 or ’81, I tried to write the first chapter of a novel and didn’t get far. I kind of forgot about it.
Then I saw something in a courtroom a few years later that inspired me to create what I thought was a powerful courtroom drama. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and, actually, one day I just said I’m going to see if I can put this on paper. I sat down and wrote the first page. Before I knew it the first chapter was finished, and it became a kind of hobby.
But I never made the decision, “I’m going to be a writer.” It was gradual and unplanned. I think I probably dreamed back then that I would one day be able to write for a living because you know a lot of people share that dream.
Q: Why do your books sell so well?
A: I don’t know. I’ve read a lot of analyses. The books are enjoyable. They have a certain flow and a certain lever of suspense so that they generally can be read quickly. People get caught up in them.
One thing that helped is that the books are relatively clean, and when The Firm was published a lot of people bought the book and realized they could give it to their 15-year-old son or daughter and also to their parents.
So the books were passed around.
That is a significant reason for why these books have sold. Another reason is that the American reading publication and also movie and television audiences have had an insatiable appetite for stories about lawyers, courtroom drama, law firms and shenanigans - something much ingrained in our society. Overall, I can’t tell you why these books have done better than other books.
Q: What is a typical day like for you when you are working on a book?
A: When I’m pushed up to the deadline it gets to be a burdensome. I write from about 4 or 5 in the morning until noon. Then I take off a couple of hours and play with the kids when they get home from school. After dinner, I come back and review and revise and get ready for the next morning. That’s six and sometimes seven days a week.
If I’m not under the crunch of a deadline, I’ll write from 7 or 8 in the morning until now. The business aspects of writing have reached a point where they take several hours a day – typically after lunch.
These books take about six months to write, and I’ll spend about a couple months, when a book is published, doing promotional work. The rest of the time I just take care of the business end.
Q: You are good dealing with the media. For example we noticed how easily you won over the people at the Today show on NBC.
A: Well, a lot of it goes back to the fact that I was a trial lawyer for 10 years. I spent a lot of time in courtrooms. I’ve always had the ability to think and move quickly on my feet.
Also, I was in the legislature for seven years. That develops sort of a quick tongue and a thick skin and the ability to dodge punches. Those two careers together have helped me deal with media and other people.
Q: There’s a softness to the way you do it. We know many lawyers and legislators who don’t have the winsomeness that you exhibit… Are you going to keep on this relentless schedule and write another book within a year after The Chamber?
A: I have a four-book contract with Doubleday, and this is the first of four. The contract is sort of specific that it will be a book a year, and I’m comfortable with that. When I finish this contract I’d probably like to take off a year or two and take a breath and then probably write another book.
Q: You’re no worth millions of dollars. Is it daunting to make so much money so fast?
A: It’s unsettling. Sure It’s happened in two years, but we were comfortable before this happened. I had been practicing law for 10 years and working hard. So we were not going without anything. But you struggle with it when all this happens, when all this money is dropped on you, and you ask, “Why? Why has it happened to me? What am I supposed to do with? There’s got to be a reason for it.”
There’s some guilt that goes with it. My wife and I both come form middle-class families. Suddenly all this money puts pressure from different angles on you.
We’ve always had the attitude that this is temporary. The money may not be temporary, but the fame certainly is. It’s much like the career of an athlete. There are some good years and bad years, but one of these days it will be over, and we’ve always said that we hoped we would look back and say it was fun while it lasted, we kept our feet on the ground, we didn’t change and it’s time to go on to something else.
Q: How has your life changed since you become so famous and so wealthy?
A: For the most part, it’s lot of fun.
Q: You haven’t gone to Hollywood, though.
A: I have no desire to go to Hollywood. I have no interest in things out there. I don’t get involved in the making of the movies. I keep my distance.
Q: you moved to Oxford from Southaven, Miss., a suburb of Memphis, in 1990. Did you move for specific reasons?
A: Yes. I went to law school at Ole Miss in Oxford. When I finished school, Renee had completed two years of her undergraduate worked here, and we were married in Oxford, at First Baptist Church.
Over the years it became more and more important for her to finish her education. Then we woke up one morning and had sold the film rights to The Firm, most unexpectedly, and we had a bunch of money, or more than we had ever thought we’d have.
I said, “I’m tired of being a lawyer.” We decided to move back to oxford so Renee could go back to school and I could write books. That was a significant change that all this has brought about. The other change was that I don’t practice law.
The biggest adjustment for us that we’re still having a hard time with is the loss of privacy. We just get frustrated when there are intrusions into our lives.
Q: What kind of intrusions?
A: People who just show up and knock on the door and want to come look at the house or want me to sign books. Those kinds of things will drive you crazy.
We still think of ourselves as being normal. We do not think of ourselves as being celebrities, but we’re learning a lot of people don’t want me to be normal. The people around me have changed. They want me to be a celebrity because they’ve met me or know me, and they treat me differently.
Q: Can your children cope with this?
A: so far, but they’re young. They hear things at school. But they don’t hear them at home. We don’t talk about my books or money. The older they get, more they’re going to hear, and we’re just going to have to deal with it.
Q: So many famous and gifted writers come from the American South. What were some of your formative experiences growing up in this region that has produced so many great writers?
A: I was born in Jonesboro, Ark., and we moved all over the Deep South. My father worked for a construction company, and he was transferred every year or two depending where the work was. We lived in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Looking back, it was important for me because I had to adjust to new situation, new schools and new people. We did not have a lot of money, and that was not important to us.
The first thing we did when we moved was join the local Southern Baptist church. The second thing we did was go to the public library and get library cards. Mother did not believe in television. I grew up reading books, and I’m sure that inspired me to be a writer. My father’s family is a family of storyteller, and there were long dinners and lots of stories as children, we absorbed them.
Q: Your wife plays a role in your writing. Could you have been so successful without her?
A: I’ll tell you there’s no way we would be talking right now about books because this stuff would never have happened. Early on, when I wrote the first chapter of A Time To Kill in long hand and showed it to Renee, I said, “Take a look at this.” She read it and said, “This is pretty good. I’d like to read the next chapter.” I said, “OK. Let me write it.”
Had it not been or those early words of encouragement back when I was shooting in the dark, I could have lost hope. When you start writing your first book, you don’t know if you’re going to finish it. You have a great idea. You’re motivated, inspired and all that. You want to write a novel, but it takes an awful long time. It’s part time at best. It’s a hobby.
There’s another pivotal point. I was finishing A Time To Kill. I had several ideas for the next book, and I said, “Renee, listen to this idea.”
I gave her a two- or three-sentence synopsis of a book that I was going to call The Firm. She really, really liked it. She said, “That is a big book. That book has a tremendous commercial potential.”
We talked about it, and it grew out from that little seed into the novel The Firm.
If she hadn’t liked it so well, I’d have tried to write something else, and I don’t know if that would have been successful or not.
Q: Do you still run things by her?
A: Constantly. Constantly. Almost every week. I’ll say, “What about this?” or I’ll see something on TV, and I’ll add a twist and think about it for a few days. Then I’ll talk to her about it.
Q: Do you ever ask, “How in the world did this happened to me?” or “Why me, Lord?”
A: Yes. I used to ask it all the time. I’m kind of getting used to it, but it still hits occasionally.
I go for long walks in the woods a lot, and I ask myself if I’m handling it the way it out o be handled. I don’t know why it happened to me, but I firmly believe it’s temporary. It well be over one of these days – five years from now, 10 years from now. The books will stop selling for whatever reason. All this is temporary.
Q: What would you like to say that we have not asked?
A: one of the things I’m most gratified about is that the books are very, very clean. I’m never going to write a book that I’d be ashamed for my children to read when they get older. I hope it says something about our culture that you can be successful without succumbing to all the gratuitous sex and language that is so prevalent today.