Although his college education was interrupted by three years as an Army private in Europe during World War II, he ultimately earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Although he never returned there to live, his Depression-era boyhood in the Cape Fear region, spent accompanying his grandfather to auctions and clerking at his father's general store, informed his writing, providing him with a lifetime of material for his fiction and poetry.
The story of one man's struggle between religion and sex was critically well received, but its seriousness left Owen ready to write some lighter fiction.
The 1970 novel Journey for Joedel won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for best work of fiction by a North Carolinian.
His collection The White Stallion and Other Poems won a Roanoke-Chowan cup for poetry by a North Carolina poet.