Jan Karon

Jan Karon
Born	Janice Meredith Wilson 1937 Lenoir, North Carolina

Jan Karon is an American novelist who writes for both adults and young readers. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling Mitford novels, featuring Father Timothy Kavanagh, an Episcopalian priest, and the fictional village of Mitford. Her most recent Mitford novel, Come Rain or Come Shine, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. She has been designated a lay Canon for the Arts in the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy (Illinois) by Keith Ackerman, Episcopal Bishop of Quincy, and in 2015, she was awarded the Library of Virginia's Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. Her original papers-to date are archived in Special Collections at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library.

Karon was born in 1937 in the Blue Ridge foothills town of Lenoir, North Carolina as Janice Meredith Wilson. Fittingly, 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. Her mother Wanda – 15 at Karon's birth – went to Charlotte. Her father, Robert Wilson, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

At 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, five years older, worked at a Charlotte tire store, while Karon worked in a clothing store. At 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. Younger brother Alan Freeland recalls that he and Robert were at Charlotte's Stork Drive In when friends showed up, having been shooting a pistol at the Catawba River. They handed the gun through the window to Alan Freeland. A bullet punctured one of Robert Freeland's lungs and chipped his spine, nearly killing him and leaving him paralyzed. Karon was distraught and tried again to make the marriage work. It did not, and the couple divorced.

Karon, 18, was on her own with little 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.

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