John GrishamEssay title: John GrishamDear Yearbook committee,I received your invitation to the class reunion of the UM graduating class of 1981. I am overjoyed to see you all again, and I also accept your invitation to speak at the opening ceremony. As per your request of an autobiography, I wrote a short synopsis of what I feel has affected my writing the most. Hopefully, this will fit in well enough with your scheme for the reunion book. I hope you enjoy.
Each one of us has a different road to take, and what we do before and after we make our decisions determine whom we are. So, I hope that I can assist you in assessing me and my writings through this paper, and, thus, I can help you see not only me, John Grisham the writer, but also me, John Grisham the man.
I was borne in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8th, 1955 (www.randomhouse.com/features/grisham/). My family was relatively large, and, unfortunately for us, we were rather poor, but we were never really knowledgeable about it. We were always happy, bouncing, and hyper children. We wouldn’t stay in one town for a large amount of time. We would go to multiple towns for my father, who was in search of a stable carpentry job. At each stop, we would set our valuables down wherever we may be staying and then my mother would take us to the local library. We’d each get our own library card and 3 or 4 books (Pringle 1). Our education came before everything else in my parents’ eyes.
Ultimately, we settled in a little town in Mississippi. I didn’t really care for writing very much, but my real passion was baseball. Education didn’t really rank high on my list, despite my parents best efforts. One of my language arts teachers later said that she saw promise in me but I didn’t want to develop it. I would occasionally read classic authors. My personal favorite was John Steinbeck.
After high school, I then went to Mississippi State and attempted to become a professional baseball player. After I realized that I didn’t have what it took to make it in professional baseball got a degree in accounting (Jebb 1). I then married my sweetheart Renee Jones from my hometown in Southaven, Mississippi. We had two children who are now 20(Ty) and 18(Shea) and bought a wonderful house on the outskirts of Southaven. After we settled in, I went back to school at Oxford at University of Mississippi. It was there, in 1981, I got my law degree (Pringle 1)
I started a 1-man firm in Southaven. Starting with criminal law, I took a couple of cases. My first murder case was rather intense in itself. My defendant shot his wife’s lover 6 times in the head. We pleaded self-defense, considering the victim shot the defendant with a .22 caliber pistol (even though the round bounced off the defendant’s chest)(Pringle 2) I started taking civil cases as well.
Ultimately, I found law to be boring. I often found myself dosing off and finding myself sitting next to a person who I didn’t like representing them in cases that were ultimately a waste of time. So during slow periods, I called a friend of mine to make an unscheduled vacation (I told my wife I was going to New York to file some paperwork on this particular occasion). It was here that I began my first real attempt at writing. As my college friend and I entertained ourselves by sitting in on court cases, we happened upon the most striking case I have ever heard. A white girl was raped and beaten by a rather large and intimidating man. The defense had to call their last witness, and they called the victim. It was by far the greatest display of human emotion I have ever seen, and as I watched, I thought to myself, “What would I do if I was that child’s father? How would I handle it?” Instantly, I developed a plot for a story. It was too good and I had to write it down (Pringle 26). On what legal notepaper I had, I started scribbling down notes to, from and during our little trips to a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. These notes I later organized, and finally produced my first, and most powerful in my opinion, book, A Time to Kill.
I made the setting of the story a little county named Ford, where the population was 74% white. Two men named Billy Ray Cobb and Pete Willard are known as the two rednecks that have no socially redeeming value. After getting drunk, they kidnap a young girl named Tonya Hailey. They drink and rape her all night long, and afterwards, they leave her for dead. However, they suspect that she isn’t dead because “Niggers generally don’t die after kicking, beating, and raping (Pringle 26).” The offenders are caught. Carl Lee Hailey, Tonya’s father, discovers what happened to Tonya and knows exactly what he should do. The novel tracks his every move up to the point where the prisoners are being transferred outside to a vehicle. This is where Carl Lee
is a key villain, and when he is caught, he is beaten to death. An alternate version is set during the late nineties of the mid-90s in San Francisco, where “Gloria
was a notorious gang of drug addicts from out of town, and where Tonya is born. The gang was in fact named in this short story: the Los Angeles Daily News, “Sanctuary for White Drug Dealers by Gloria
, the original Los Angeles Independent, published by the writer. In the early nineties, one man named Joe Johnson, became a gang leader after his first night of violence in the Pacific Northwest. In his role as gang leader, he has no clue what it is like to live in a city which, despite the fact that there is so much drug-related violence everywhere, still stands as an American symbol, but he does manage to get out alive. He calls it a “Gloria” after John Oliver, who is best known for his portrayal of a drug lord. Although Johnson is often portrayed as a “real black man,” he has also written many other characters (such as the protagonist’s father as a real, loving father) that are not black. This version does not include the fact that many gangs throughout this story never actually exist (Lorenstein et al. 1989). It is also possible that Lorenstein, Lorneh, and Kuzma did not make the story from start to finish based on the material depicted in their work, and thus did not want to portray actual victims in the same way. There is, however, a possibility that they did just that, and that was that for reasons that were unknown at the time, the gang was moved to the fictional Los Angeles. This story is set in 1950s San Francisco and is set in the early 2000s. The gang was eventually recaptured by the FBI, which then allowed the gang out of the city, and subsequently moved to the fictional Los Angeles where it would eventually be found, but for some inexplicable reason the gang is never seen again and it is assumed that there will be never again anything resembling that gang alive. In the following few paragraphs and in the next several paragraphs I will go over the gang and its current inhabitants:
Gloria, as she is still called (analogously, “the white drug dealer”, “drug kingpin”) was an extremely powerful and prolific criminal; as the characters of the novel indicate, her most famous and infamous possession was the infamous “Mafia” or the Murder Family which had a notorious history of executing their victims. In addition, for those of us with mental illness, she was extremely corrupt and even considered child molester. She was known to have been engaged to her lover, the convicted felon, and to carry out acts of cannibalism