Grisham was born in 1955 in Arkansas, in the US A, the son of a building worker. (‘We didn’t have a lot of money ,’ he has said. ‘But we didn’t know it’) He studied law and ran his own law firm for nine years, and was also a local politician in Mississippi. In 1984 he decided to write a novel and spent three years arriving at his office at 5 a.m. in order to write it. This was A Time to Kill. It did not sell well, but success soon followed. With the money he made from The Firm, Grisham was able to give up his law practice and concentrate on writing.