John Grisham is an American author of crime thrillers, whose best known works include The Firm, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief. Grisham studied law at the University of Mississippi, becoming an attorney and winning election to the House of Representatives in 1984. His legal and political background informed his fiction writing, with his debut novel, A Time to Kill, springing out of a real-life encounter that Grisham had with a twelve year old courtroom witness. His breakthrough came in 1991 with the publication of The Firm, which remained on the New York Times bestseller lists for 47 weeks and spawned a hit Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise. Subsequent books have occasionally departed from the legal template but most continue to be set in the Southern states of America. In 2010 Grisham branched out into children’s fiction with the Theodore Boone series, featuring the eponymous thirteen year old legal obsessive.
