Bobbie Ann Mason - Introduction

     Bobbie Ann Mason was born in Mayfield, Kentucky on May 1, 1940.  She is an American short-story writer and novelist.  She is known for her recreation of rural Kentucky life.  She was raised on a dairy farm.  Her first experienced life outside of Kentucky was when she traveled through the Midwest as the teenage president of the fan club for a pop quartet, the Hilltoppers.  She became interested in writing as a child, when she wrote skits of the mystery series novels that she read.  In 1962, she graduated from the University of Kentucky, Lexington with a B.A. and moved to New York City.  In 1966, she attended the State University of New York at Binghamton and graduated with a M.A.  She also attended the University of Connecticut, Storrs and received her Ph.D. in 1972.  She was an assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania’s Mansfield State College from 1972 to 1979.  She then began writing full-time, publishing stories in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and in other places.  In her first collection of stories she describes the lives of working class people in a shifting rural society now dominated by chain stores, televisions, and superhighways.  She has received critical praise from Shiloh and Other Stories which were her first collection of stories.  Her first collection of stories won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and she received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her first novel, In Country, is also immersed in mass culture, which led one critic to speak of Mason’s “Shopping Mall Realism.”  This novel is taught widely in classes and was made into a film.  Many critics praised her realistic regional dialogue, although some compared the novel unfavorably with her shorter works.  Mason published Spence + Lila in 1988 which was a story of a long-married couple.  She is a writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.                   

"Biography - Bobbie Ann Mason." Home - Bobbie Ann Mason. Web. 25 Apr. 2011

"Bobbie Ann Mason." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 25 Apr. 2011