In short, Grisham wrote about racism, poverty, class hatred, public corruption, and political and social betrayal – and told a powerful tale in the process. His work is particularly compelling in that Grisham illuminates the most volatile of our Southern cultural idiosyncrasies without apologies.” In a 1989 column, I wrote: “Grisham is a powerful writer who possesses an achingly fine ear for the rhythms of our language. He was smart, not overly impressed with himself, and I liked him immediately.īut when I read “A Time to Kill” after that meeting in my newspaper office, I was astounded at the power of his storytelling and the quality of his sparse writing style. We shared a love of Mississippi State baseball. I was introduced to John by one of his colleagues in the Mississippi House of Representatives.

They printed a few thousand copies, and Grisham hauled and sold books in the trunk of his car in the early days. He was a member of the Mississippi Legislature when Wynwood Press finally published the book. Grisham’s travails in finding a publisher for that first novel remain the stuff of legend in Mississippi.

Readers first met Jake in “A Time to Kill.” Brigance, a struggling white attorney in a small Mississippi town, was appointed to defend Carl Lee Hailey, a Black man who indeed murdered the two white men who had raped and beaten his 10-year-old daughter. Grisham’s new vehicle for Jake Brigance is called “A Time for Mercy,” and it is already at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. In Clanton time, the case is five years removed from “A Time to Kill.” Once again, Jake Brigance is appointed to defend another client whose case no other attorney wants to take. Now, 31 years after the 1989 publication of “A Time to Kill,” comes another scandalous murder in Ford County. Yet like a bad penny, Grisham has kept young, idealistic, and sometimes foolhardy attorney Jake Brigance handing around the Ford County Courthouse in Clanton, Mississippi. Looking back over 31 years of a meteoric writing career that ranks him as one of the most successful writers on the planet, novelist John Grisham’s flawed hero from his very first novel might well be a forgotten figure among the hundreds the author has created.

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