University of Mississippi

John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers. John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State... University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade. He also served in the House of Representatives in Mississippi from January 1984 to September 1990. Beginning writing in 1984, he had his first novel A Time To Kill published in June 1989. As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. A Galaxy British Book Awards winner, Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing, the others being Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling. Grisham's first best seller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel.
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Elizabeth Spencer is a writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She has written a total of nine novels, seven... collections of short stories, a memoir , and a play . Her novella The Light in the Piazza was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction. Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at local J.Z. George High School. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi and her Master's Degree in Literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943. Spencer taught at the junior-college level for two years before accepting a job with the Nashville Tennessean, but she soon returned to teaching, this time at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1953 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and left Mississippi to live in Italy and pursue writing full time.
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William Forrest Winter is an American politician from Mississippi. He served as the 58th Governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984 as a Democrat. He... is known for his strong support of public education, freedom of information, racial reconciliation, and historic preservation. Winter is best remembered for the passage of the Mississippi Education Reform Act. The law was the first serious attempt at improving state education in over 20 years and, among other things, established public kindergartens. He is a graduate of the University of Mississippi and the Ole Miss law school, where he served as Editor of the Mississippi Law Journal. During his time at Ole Miss, he was an active member of the Phi Delta Theta chapter. During World War II, Winter served in the United States Army infantry in the Philippines where he attained the rank of captain. On Luzon Island in the Philippines, the subject was Liaison Officer and Acting Assistant G-3 of the 86th Infantry Division.
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