Born in Chicago, Grant was originally a journalist in his home town. He wrote a short story, "The Whipsaw," for the 11 Aug 1934 issue of Liberty, which was turned into a movie with Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy launching his screenwriting career.

Grant wrote numerous short stories that were published in Argosy, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Liberty, among others.^[2]

He also wrote a play Plan M.

John Wayne called Grant "a dear friend", and said of him:

He had a great talent as a writer. Jimmy was a short story writer. Now a short story writer doesn't have all the voluminous language that dulls a scene. He had to make the dialogue give character to a person and progress the story, and that's practically what Ford as a director did all the time. Ford cut through the nuance and all that crap and got down to the basic story. He put the nuance in with the camera. Jimmy was a writer of the same type ... I knew Jimmy Grant for twenty years. It's very handy to have somebody like that. You know with writers, you don't have enough contact with them.^[3]

A chain smoker, Grant died from lung cancer in Burbank, California.^[4][5]

He owned a cattle ranch in Winton in Merced County from the 1940s until his death. ^{[citation needed]}

Grant won the Bronze Wrangler, an annual award presented by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, twice, for The Alamo in 1961 and The Comancheros the following year. He and William Bowers were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Sheepman in 1959.

• James Edward Grant at IMDb