Best-selling author John Grisham said Wednesday that journalism plays a critical role in Mississippi and the nation.
Grisham, the keynote speaker at Mississippi Today’s 10th Anniversary Celebration, told an audience of more than 200 people that the work of journalists “is important, not only to tell the truth, but to expose the corruption of the system, to make known what has happened, to try to pressure the authorities and legislators to make changes in the law.
“And as a sideline, to give people like me something to fictionalize about.”
Grisham, who grew up in Southaven and once practiced law there, has authored more than 50 consecutive No. 1 bestsellers. He has received the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction and twice won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. All but two of his books have been novels.
He doesn’t think of himself as a journalist, but he did the work of a journalist in writing his first nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town,” about a former baseball player wrongly convicted of rape and murder. That man, Ron Williamson, spent 11 years on death row in Oklahoma before DNA and other evidence helped exonerate him in 1999.
Grisham knew nothing about the case until he read Williamson’s obituary in The New York Times. He telephoned his publisher, told him about the obit and said he was writing a book about it. The next day, Grisham took off for Oklahoma to talk with his family.
”I had never thought about nonfiction,” he said. “I was having way too much fun with the novels. I knew it’d be a lot of work, but I didn’t care.”
That case, he said Wednesday, “took me into the world of wrongful convictions.”
A novel usually takes Grisham about six months to write. That nonfiction book took him 18 months.
That grind made him swear he would never write another nonfiction book. With a novel, he said he’s never worried about accuracy. He just makes things up.
“The Innocent Man” led him to meet Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world dedicated to freeing the wrongfully convicted. While working as a prison chaplain, McCloskey learned that one man, Jorge de los Santos, was wrongfully convicted. He started Centurion, helping to free him and 70 others.
Best-selling author John Grisham speaks at the Mississippi Today 10th Anniversary Celebration at the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayGrisham joined the board of directors of Centurion and the Innocence Project. Through that work, the author has heard many exonerees share their stories.
He now opposes the death penalty because he has concluded the way it’s applied is unfair and can result in the execution of innocent people.
In 2024, he released his second nonfiction book, “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions,” which features stories of 23 people caught up in the criminal justice system. He co-wrote the book with McCloskey.
Under pressure to solve crimes, authorities often pick a suspect and ignore all the evidence that contradicts it, Grisham said. Since 1989, there have been more than 3,700 exonerations in the U.S.
After the release of “Framed,” Grisham swore he would never again write another nonfiction book. Now he’s working on another one.
The subject matter of his new book? Another wrongful conviction case, this one in Texas.
“My last,” he said. “I swear.”
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