Karon was born in 1937, in the Blue Ridge foothills town of Lenoir.

The road to Mitford was long and full of curves.

But she recently opened up to the Charlotte Observer on certain subjects, some painful.įamily and old friends - unanimously recalling the young Karon as beautiful, bright, driven, daring - provided a fuller picture of an author's life that has been more dramatic than her fiction. Karon, 68, has been guarded about her early life, saying she doesn't want to steal 'shine' from Mitford. Newspaper and magazine profiles have told how, at age 50 and as a recent born-again Christian, Karon left a flourishing advertising career in Raleigh, N.C., for the mountain village of Blowing Rock, where she pursued her dream of writing fiction. Her Mitford books make mainstream and Christian best-seller lists, embraced by readers hungry for well-told fiction that avoids profanity and sex, and positively shows a life of faith. The Karon phenomenon has occurred in just over a decade, without a movie version, Oprah endorsement or single review in The New York Times. mountain town of that name, feature a 60-something Episcopal priest and his colorful parishioners. Her Mitford novels, set in a fictional N.C. Jan Karon lives on a $2 million rural Virginia estate, a few miles from John Grisham. Reading or replaying the story in itsĪrchived form does not constitute a republication of the story.ĬHARLOTTE, N.C. Only for your personal, non-commercial use.

At home in mitford books in order