Charlie Lovett was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and grew up surrounded by books as the child of an English professor. He developed an early love for the countryside during his family's summer trips to the rural mountains of North Carolina. Lovett attended Summit School, Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, and Davidson College in North Carolina. In 1984, he embarked on a career in the antiquarian book business with his first wife, Stephanie, and began collecting books and materials related to Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
After leaving the book business in the early 1990s, Lovett continued to expand his collection of rare books and artifacts related to Lewis Carroll and his world. He pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) and wrote Love, Ruth, a book about his mother, Ruth Candler Lovett, who passed away when he was two years old. The book received praise from Maya Angelou, who described it as "tender, sensitive, and true." Lovett then traveled to England with his wife, Janice, and daughter, Jordan, and lived in Kingham, Oxfordshire, for six months. They fell in love with the culture and made lifelong friends, eventually purchasing the cottage they had rented in 1997 and renovating it. Lovett and his wife now spend several weeks a year in Kingham and have traveled extensively throughout the UK.
In 2001, Lovett began his career as a children's playwright when his wife, who was working at Summit School, asked him to write a play due to the lack of good material. Over the next eleven years, Lovett wrote nineteen plays for third, eighth, and ninth graders, which have been performed in all fifty states and over twenty foreign countries. During this time, he also wrote his first novel-length manuscript in the early 1990s and published The Program in 2008, followed by The Fat Lady Sings. His breakthrough as a writer came with The Bookman's Tale, a New York Times bestseller, Barnes and Noble Recommends selection, and a novel translated into several foreign languages. Lovett's next novel, First Impressions, is another literary adventure, this time starring Jane Austen. People Magazine called it "a delightful novel that weaves together a modern love story and a literary mystery involving Jane Austen."
In 2015, Lovett curated a major exhibition called Alice Live! at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and wrote the introduction to the new Penguin Books edition of Alice. His Christmas book, The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge, was published in 2016, and his new novel, The Lost Book of the Grail, will be published on February 28, 2017. Lovett's success as a writer is due in large part to the support and love of his wonderful wife, Janice, and his fabulous children, Jimmy and Jordan.