Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason 1940-, American regional author, b. Mayfield, Ky., grad. Univ. of Kentucky (B.A., 1962), State Univ. of New York, Binghamton (M.A., 1966), Univ. of Connecticut (Ph.D., 1972). Her dissertation, a study of nature imagery in Nabokov Ada, was published as Nabokov's Garden (1974) and was followed by The Girl Sleuth (1975), a feminist guide to Nancy Drew and her ilk. Mason taught (1972-79) at Pennsylvania's Mansfield College, leaving academia to become a full-time writer. She is best known for her acutely observed short stories of working-class life in the New South, which began to appear in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines in the early 1980s. The pop-culture milieu of strip malls, tract houses, fast-food joints, and trash television characterizes her highly acclaimed first volume of stories, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), and reappears with other facets of contemporary Southern life in later collections— Love Life (1989), Midnight Magic (1998), and Zigzagging down a Wild Trail (2001). Mason has also written novels, e.g., In Country (1982), Feather Crowns (1993), and An Atomic Romance (2005).

Bibliography: See her Clear Springs: A Memoir (1999); A. Wilhelm, Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998); J. Price, Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason (1998).

Mason, Bobbie Ann (1940– ),short story writer, novelist. On publication of Shiloh and Other Stories in 1982, Mason was greeted as a major talent—a perfect voice for the rural shopping‐mall frequenters and strivers after a meaningful and fully materialist life. Mason was born and raised near Mayfield, Ky., a region most of her characters are drawn from. At the University of Connecticut, she wrote a dissertation on Nabokov's novel Ada, later published as Nabokov's Garden (1974), followed by The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and Their Sisters (1975). But she was, she says, “haunted by the people I went to high school with” and found her true voice writing about them. Later novels were In Country (1985), about a young woman whose father died in Vietnam, and Spence+Lila (1988), which examines love strained by a woman's trials with breast cancer. Feather Crowns (1993) is set in Hopewell, Ky., in 1900, where Christie Wheeler gives birth to quintuplets; she and her husband become instant celebrities, but the fame is not an unmixed blessing, and the novel explores dealing with uncertainties. The stories in Love Life (1989) revisit the domain of Shiloh.