John Grisham Reveals His Ill-Fated Plans to Be an Asphalt Man and Tax Lawyer
Even the most successful people don’t always follow a straight, upward trajectory to success. And that includes famous legal novelist John Grisham.
Before college, he had a series of dead-end jobs, he writes for the New York Times. He helped lay chain-link fence for a nursery, crawled under houses for a plumbing contractor, sold underwear at Sears, and worked on a highway asphalt crew. At the age of 17, he thought the asphalt business was promising, until one fateful celebration at a honky-tonk.
“When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window,” he writes. “I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.”
In college, he decided he would become a high-powered tax lawyer. “The plan was sailing along until I took my first course in tax law,” he says. “I was stunned by its complexity and lunacy, and I barely passed the course.”
Instead, he decided to become a hot-shot trial lawyer, accepting indigent defense work to get into the courtroom. The pay was less than lucrative, and he ran for the state legislature and won. His legislative pay in 1983 was $8,000, more than he had earned his first year as a lawyer. He kept up his legal practice, and spent a lot of time loitering around the courthouse, observing trials. It was there that he got the idea for his first book, A Time to Kill.
It didn’t sell, so he kept working as a lawyer, and he kept writing. “I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort,” he writes. “It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off.”
