Jan Karon was born on March 14, 1937 in Lenoir, North Carolina, to Robert Cecil Wilson (1914-1977) and Wanda Lee Wilson (1921- ) and was named Janice Meredith after the title of a popular novel. She and her younger sister, Brenda, lived as children with her grandparents, Monroe Ivy Cloer and Fannie Bush Cloer, on their farm outside Hudson, North Carolina. Both sisters later moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to join their mother who had married Toby Setzer, the owner of a hosiery knitting business.

At fourteen, Karon married Robert Bryan Freeland (1932-1995) in Charlotte and had one daughter, Candace Rae Freeland, in 1952. Her advertising career began at the age of eighteen, at Walter J. Klein Company, one of the first advertising agencies in the region.

Karon's marriage to Robert Freeland ended in divorce and in her early twenties, Karon married a Duke Power chemist, Bill Orth, and became active in the Charlotte Little Theater, the Mint Museum Drama Guild, and in local social and political issues. She was one of four white women who marched in an early civil rights protest, led by the Reverend Sydney Freeman, along Charlotte's North Tyron Street.

During the late sixties, she and Orth divorced. Karon then married Arthur Karon, a clothing salesman who moved the family to Berkeley, California, where they lived for three years.

After their marriage ended, Karon returned to Charlotte, North Carolina, and begun working again in advertising. Her dismissal from a Charlotte TV production company in 1982 precipitated what she called the 'proverbial dark night of the soul.' Karon returned to the faith taught her as a child by her grandmother. She began attending Charlotte's interdenominational Calvary Church, and worked as a free-lance copywriter until her move to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1983, where she joined McKinney and Silver, an internationally renowned advertising firm.

She became an award- winning creative vice-president at McKinney, working on cruise line and airline accounts. There she won, with art director Michael Winslow, the coveted Steven E. Kelly Award, the print advertising equivalent of the Academy Award. Semi-finalists included British Airways, Harley-Davidson, and Waterford Crystal.

Her daughter, Candace Freeland, pursued photojournalism, winning numerous awards with the , the , and a stint in Central America for the .

In order to pursue her dream of writing a novel, Karon left her advertising career and, at age fifty, bought a house in the small mountain town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where she supported her dream with freelance advertising work.

Soon, she approached the editor of with a couple of chapters featuring an Episcopal priest named Tim Kavanagh, which he urged her to run in . The ensuing two years of writing the priest's story for resulted in her first novel, , published in paper by a small publishing house in the Midwest. Twenty years after its initial release in paper, the novel appeared in its 85th printing, in a new, 20th anniversary hardcover edition, from Penguin-Random House, the world's largest trade publisher.

The second and third Mitford novels, and , were published by the same house, with limited marketing and distribution. Karon took the promotion of her books into her own hands, cold-selling them to bookstores and befriending bookstore owners. In Raleigh, bookseller Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books, was given a copy of by Mary Richardson, Karon's Raleigh neighbor and friend. Olson admired the work and in 1996 introduced Karon to literary agent Liz Darhansoff. Darhansoff showed the Karon books to Carolyn Carlson at Penguin, and a long and fruitful relationship began. At this writing (2016), Karon has published twenty-two works of fiction and non-fiction, with sales estimated at more than 40 million, not including foreign sales in nineteen countries. Karon is currently published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin-Random House; her editor is Christine Pepe.

Jan Karon has won much recognition for her work. Among these are three nominations by the American Booksellers Association of for Best Book of the Year for three consecutive years (1996-1998) – a one-time-only occurrence in the Association's history to date.

In 2013, , which spent seventeen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was given the Library of Virginia's Best Fiction of the Year award. In 2015, Karon received The Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award. And in 2016, debuting at #1 on the list, was the recipient of the 2016 Christy Award. A further recognition is the designation of Jan Karon as a lay Canon for the Arts in the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy. For more information about honors and awards, see box 44 of this collection.

For more information about Jan Karon and her books, see the publicity – press files in boxes 55-56 of this collection, a long article in , August 14, 2005, her facebook page https://www.facebook.com/JanKaron/ and website http://www.mitfordbooks.com/ , as well as her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karon