Mr. Twain, Meet John Grisham

Serialized novels are nothing new.

More than 125 years ago, Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” and “Nicholas Nickleby” were published in regular magazine installments.

Works by Mark Twain (“Old Times on the Mississippi”), Jack London (“The Call of the Wild”) and Edith Wharton (“The Age of Innocence”) first saw print as serialized novels. More recently, Esquire published Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream” in 1964, and Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” appeared in Rolling Stone in the mid-’80s.

This month, the Oxford American magazine publishes the first installment of a new John Grisham novel, “A Painted House.” Grisham is the magazine’s publisher.

The novel, to be presented in six consecutive issues of the bimonthly journal celebrating Southern writers, is a true serialization, in that Grisham is writing the book as it appears, rather than submitting a finished work.

“When Dickens, and Thackeray and Trollope did it, they were writing by the deadline,” says Marc Smirnoff, editor of the Oxford American, in Oxford, Miss. “It was partly economics for them; it allowed them to do two things at once and get a monthly paycheck.”

“A Painted House” is different from Grisham’s usual legal thrillers. (His new novel, “The Brethren,” is scheduled for release in February.)

“The line that I’ve used is that there are no lawyers in it,” says Smirnoff, who also edits Grisham’s novels. “But besides that, I think that these are people [the characters] that he feels very close to. One of the reasons is that it’s semiautobiographic.”

In the first six chapters, Grisham tells of a young boy growing up on the Arkansas Delta in 1952.

The Oxford American has increased its press run for the issue from the usual 50,000 to 200,000. Smirnoff said “A Painted House” may be published as a book later.