Novelist John Grisham had to revise one hundred pages in his new novel after he discovered that Princeton has no law school.
The bestselling author told Above the Law that his Ivy League setting for The Associate was disrupted when he discovered that his hero couldn’t attend school at Princeton. While a research assistant conducted interviews with New York lawyers as background for the book, Grisham took his manuscript on a geographical tour.
Here’s the excerpt: “Then I went to Cornell, but I flipped open a copy of The Broker and saw that the first characters you meet went to Cornell. I used Harvard for The Firm and I didn’t want to set the law school at Columbia or some place in the city. I had a scene on a train … that I really wanted to keep, so I ended up in New Haven … I was a sick puppy when I realized there was no law school at Princeton.”