Jan Karon

Karon was born on March 14, 1937 in the Blue Ridge foothills town of Lenoir, North Carolina as Janice Meredith Wilson.[3] She was named Janice Meredith Wilson, after the novel Janice Meredith. Before Karon was 4, her parents split up and left her with her maternal grandparents on a farm a few miles from Lenoir in Hudson, North Carolina.[4] Her mother Wanda, who was 15 at Karon's birth, went to Charlotte. Her father, Robert Wilson, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

At age 12, Karon moved to Charlotte to rejoin her mother, who had married Toby Setzer and had two more children. Karon dropped out of school in ninth grade, at 14, and married Robert Freeland in South Carolina, where girls her age could do so legally. Freeland, who was five years older, worked at a Charlotte tire store, while Karon worked in a clothing store. At age 15, she gave birth to her only child, Candace Freeland.

Karon and Freeland's marriage was troubled from the beginning, and tragedy rocked it further. While Freeland was sitting in a car with one of his brothers and one or more friends, a gun was handed through the window and went off. The bullet punctured one of Robert Freeland's lungs and chipped his spine, nearly killing him and leaving him paralyzed. Karon was distraught, the marriage suffered, and she filed for divorce.

Karon, age 18, was on her own with Candace. She took a receptionist job at Walter J. Klein Co., a Charlotte advertising agency. Bored with answering the phone, she submitted writing examples. Klein soon had her writing advertising copy. In her early 20s, Karon married Bill Orth, a Duke Power chemist. Orth was active with Karon in theater and the Unitarian Church. By the late 1960s, Karon and Orth were divorced, and she had married a third time, to Arthur Karon, a clothing salesman. Arthur moved his wife and her daughter to Berkeley, California, where they lived for three years.

In California, Karon practiced Judaism, but she did not convert from Christianity. Karon wanted to be a novelist, and tried all through the 1960s. When Karon's third marriage ended she returned to Charlotte and again worked in advertising. By 1985, Karon had moved to Raleigh and the McKinney & Silver advertising agency, where she had worked in the late 1970s. Karon and Michael Winslow, a Mckinney designer, collaborated on a tourism campaign, interviewing artisans, musicians and others for print ads aimed at showing that North Carolina had other attractions besides theme parks and big hotels. One ad featured mountain musicians under the headline, "The Best Place to Hear Old English Music Is 3,000 Miles West of London." The campaign, which ran in National Geographic and other magazines, won the 1987 Kelly Award, the print advertising equivalent of the Academy Award. Karon and Winslow split a $100,000 prize.

In 1988, Karon quit her job, traded her Mercedes for a used Toyota and moved to Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In Blowing Rock, Karon began writing Father Tim stories for the Blowing Rocket newspaper. An agent circulated Karon's fiction to publishers, but got only rejections. In 1994, Karon herself placed her work with a small religious publisher, which brought out a volume titled At Home in Mitford. Karon kept writing, and employed her marketing skills to promote her book, writing press releases and cold-calling bookstores. But the publisher offered limited distribution and little marketing muscle of its own. Two more Mitford novels appeared. Sales remained modest. Then Karon's friend Mary Richardson, mother of Carolina Panthers' owner Jerry Richardson, showed At Home in Mitford to Nancy Olson, owner of Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh. Olson felt there was a large audience looking for clean, well-written fiction. She sent Karon's book to a New York agent friend, who got it to Carolyn Carlson, an editor at Viking Penguin and daughter of a Lutheran minister. Carlson faced opposition at Viking Penguin, a mainstream publisher unused to Christian fiction. But in 1996 the New York firm brought out Karon's first three titles as paperbacks. By the late 1990s, Karon's books were New York Times bestsellers.

In 2000, Karon left Blowing Rock and moved to Albemarle County, Virginia, where she restored a historic 1816 home and 100 acre farm, Esmont Farm, built by Dr. Charles Cocke (who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly before the American Civil War).[5][6] Enniscorthy had been listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, but had been delisted in 1997 based upon the removal of outlying structures by a prior owner.[7]

Jan Karon's papers are held at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University Virginia, and regular additions are made to document Karon's new works. The papers include preparatory materials for all of Karon's books, personal correspondence and papers, extensive papers related to her historical restoration of Esmont Farm, and correspondence with readers.

• Official site for the Mitford series author
• December 6, 2005 lecture given by Karon at the National Cathedral, entitled Wrestling with and Writing from the Heart
• Current biography at Penguin