John Grisham Is Passionate About The Innocent Man
John Grisham Is Passionate About 'The Innocent Man' Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply. Close
His only nonfiction work, 2006’s true-crime best-seller The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, just hit Netflix as a six-part documentary series. Critics are offering mixed reviews, some describing it as confusing and less gripping than hot true-crime series such as Netflix's big hit, Making a Murderer. But Grisham found the story absorbing enough to detour from fiction for. “I’d never thought about writing nonfiction before I wrote The Innocent Man,” Grisham says. “I was having far too much fun writing the novels and fictionalizing real stories, but when I read the story of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, I just knew I couldn’t fictionalize that, because nobody would have believed it — it’s such a bizarre story. The truth was good enough.” A tale as dramatic as any of the author’s blockbuster thrillers, it explores how four men were implicated in the grisly murders of two women in a small Oklahoma town in the 1980s. Grisham's book and the documentary argue convincingly that all four are innocent: Two (Williamson and Fritz) have been exonerated; the others (Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot) are serving life sentences but are working to get their convictions overturned. Grisham calls the sentencing of these men “a huge breakdown in our criminal justice systems.” Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > And that’s just for starters. “We’re proud of our progress,” he says, “but we have a long way to go.” Grisham grew up in Mississippi, and went to law school at Ole Miss, but once he reached blockbuster-author status — with the publication of The Firm in 1991 — he and his wife, Renee, left their home in Oxford, Miss., for a quieter retreat. They’ve lived for decades on a sprawling farm in an 18th-century farmhouse outside of Charlottesville, Va., where Renee trains horses. “We try to keep life simple,” he says. A baseball fan since childhood, the author built and funds a multimillion-dollar baseball and softball complex for the community near his home. They often spend time with their son, Ty, 35, a lawyer in Charlottesville, and daughter, Shea, a teacher, who has two young children, Oliver, 2, and Marco, born in August. The fact that the grandkids live three hours away, in Raleigh, N.C., is no obstacle. “We see them all the time,” Grisham says. Family matters far more to Grisham than the opinions of those in the literary world, whose judgments he claims to ignore. “I don't really worry about what critics or people with literary pedigrees say about what I write,” he says. “Once you sell a lot of books, they dismiss you forever, so I’m not trying to please those people, because you can’t.” AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe MORE FROM AARP AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS
John Grisham Is Passionate About The Innocent Man
The author talks new Netflix version of his book selling gazillions of thrillers and being a grandfather
Netflix . “When it stops being fun,” says the 63-year-old grandfather of two, “I’ll just quit.” But why should he? Writing is Grisham’s second career — he gave up lawyering long ago — and he’s been writing prolifically since his first book, A Time to Kill, came out in 1989 (after being rejected by 28 surely still-regretful publishers). He vows to continue writing a book a year, “as long as I have the ideas, as long as I think the stories are good and the readers still enjoy the stories.” Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Readers are definitely still devouring his stories, whether in print (more than 300 million copies of his books have been sold), at the movies (nine have been made into feature films) or on TV.His only nonfiction work, 2006’s true-crime best-seller The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, just hit Netflix as a six-part documentary series. Critics are offering mixed reviews, some describing it as confusing and less gripping than hot true-crime series such as Netflix's big hit, Making a Murderer. But Grisham found the story absorbing enough to detour from fiction for. “I’d never thought about writing nonfiction before I wrote The Innocent Man,” Grisham says. “I was having far too much fun writing the novels and fictionalizing real stories, but when I read the story of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, I just knew I couldn’t fictionalize that, because nobody would have believed it — it’s such a bizarre story. The truth was good enough.” A tale as dramatic as any of the author’s blockbuster thrillers, it explores how four men were implicated in the grisly murders of two women in a small Oklahoma town in the 1980s. Grisham's book and the documentary argue convincingly that all four are innocent: Two (Williamson and Fritz) have been exonerated; the others (Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot) are serving life sentences but are working to get their convictions overturned. Grisham calls the sentencing of these men “a huge breakdown in our criminal justice systems.” Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > And that’s just for starters. “We’re proud of our progress,” he says, “but we have a long way to go.” Grisham grew up in Mississippi, and went to law school at Ole Miss, but once he reached blockbuster-author status — with the publication of The Firm in 1991 — he and his wife, Renee, left their home in Oxford, Miss., for a quieter retreat. They’ve lived for decades on a sprawling farm in an 18th-century farmhouse outside of Charlottesville, Va., where Renee trains horses. “We try to keep life simple,” he says. A baseball fan since childhood, the author built and funds a multimillion-dollar baseball and softball complex for the community near his home. They often spend time with their son, Ty, 35, a lawyer in Charlottesville, and daughter, Shea, a teacher, who has two young children, Oliver, 2, and Marco, born in August. The fact that the grandkids live three hours away, in Raleigh, N.C., is no obstacle. “We see them all the time,” Grisham says. Family matters far more to Grisham than the opinions of those in the literary world, whose judgments he claims to ignore. “I don't really worry about what critics or people with literary pedigrees say about what I write,” he says. “Once you sell a lot of books, they dismiss you forever, so I’m not trying to please those people, because you can’t.” AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe MORE FROM AARP AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS