Undeterred, the author filled his trunk with copies and drove from library to library, begging them to display his first novel. “Five thousand copies were printed and we couldn’t give them away,” Grisham says in the book’s introduction. After being rejected by 28 publishers, A Time to Kill finally hit store shelves in 1989, but it was not an immediate hit with readers. Grisham spent three years perfecting his first novel about Carl Lee Hailey, a black man who is tried in Mississippi after killing the two men who raped his daughter, and Jake Brigance, the idealistic white lawyer who represents him. I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun. “Her testimony was gut-wrenching, graphic, heartbreaking and riveting,” Grisham told The New York Times. Grisham, then 29, stuck around after work one evening to watch a rape trial-the victim was a 12-year-old girl.

In 1984, at the De Soto County courthouse in Hernando, Mississippi, a young civil litigator named John Grisham witnessed harrowing testimony that would change his life forever. Below, find out how this real-life story inspired the celebrated novel, a blockbuster film and now a thrilling drama on the Great White Way. A new stage adaptation of John Grisham's bestselling novel A Time to Kill has come to order on Broadway, starring Sebastian Arcelus as ambitious young lawyer Jake Brigance and John Douglas Thompson as Carl Lee Hailey, a man who takes the law into his own hands when a harrowing crime is committed against his daughter.

A time to kill novel