MASON, Bobbie Ann

Born 1 May 1940, Mayfield, Kentucky

Daughter of Wilber A. and Christi Anna Lee Mason; married Roger B. Rawlings, 1969

Bobbie Ann Mason writes of the world of the changing South that she inhabited during her childhood. It is a world of people who shop at Kmart, listen to rock and roll, and go to shopping malls for entertainment. She grew up on her parents' dairy farm near Mayfield, Kentucky, reading Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. When she was ten, she began to write her own mysteries. Her writing career took off briefly when she was a teenager and became the national president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club. She wrote their monthly newsletter and corresponded with the presidents of other fan clubs.

When she entered the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1958, Mason began to read more classical literature, but, she claims, she related to none of it. She knew she wanted to be a writer, but received no encouragement. Upon graduation in 1962, she went to New York and wrote for fan magazines such as Movie Stars, Movie Life, and T.V. Star Parade. She returned to graduate school and received her M.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966 and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1972. Her dissertation on Nabokov's Ada became her first published book, Nabokov's Garden: A Guide to Ada (1974). Returning to her childhood reading, Mason's second book was The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (1975). She taught English for several years at Mansfield College in Pennsylvania and started to write literary criticism and short fiction.

Mason was in her mid-thirties before she began to write serious fiction. In 1980 the New Yorker accepted her story "Offerings," which later became a part of Shiloh and Other Stories (1982). This first book of fiction was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, the American Book award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award in 1983. The title story, "Shiloh," was anthologized in Best American Short Stories for 1981, and "Graveyard Day" was reprinted in the 1983 edition of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. A sale to Redbook followed shortly thereafter.

Mason received fellowships from both the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She also joins other Southern writers (authors who live or grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line and who write about life in the South) such as Truman Capote, Pat Conroy, James Dickey, Shirley Ann Grau, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, William Styron, John Kennedy Toole, Eudora Welty, and Anne Rivers Siddons as a past Steinberg Symposium Fellow. As an interesting side note, the Prize of the United States of America was conferred on Barbara Vieser for her essay "Modernity and Regional Consciousness in Short Prose Works by Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith."

While "Shiloh" is the most anthologized, Mason feels that the central story of the book Shiloh and Other Stories is "Residents and Transients," which focuses on her fascination with the conflict between those who stay home and those who run away. The story highlights the tensions between the old and the new South and between the world of mass, popular culture, and the world of academic, elite culture. Mason has her most scathing words for the elite who disdain those who shop at Kmart and spend their leisure time at shopping malls, and she treats her drugstore workers and truck drivers with love and respect. While they pay their bills and eat at McDonald's, they often dream of something more in their lives, and these dreams lead them to paint watermelons, build log cabins out of popsicle sticks, use fennel toothpaste, and, like Mason herself, dream of returning home to Kentucky. Sometimes, though, her characters are only dimly aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason's regional sense and her eye for the details and detritus of everyday life enrich Shiloh and Other Stories, while her love for her characters lends them dignity.

Mason's first novel, In Country (1985), began with a set of characters much like those in her short stories. They live marginal lives on the fringe of the middle class and spend time listening to rock and roll and driving secondhand cars and trucks to the mall. As Mason wrote, the story of Samantha (Sam) Hughes' loss emerged. Sam's father was killed in Vietnam before she knew him. Her mother has remarried and just had a new baby, and Sam is living with her uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam veteran. The Vietnam War is the biggest thing that has happened in the lives of all the characters, and in America's life as well. While rejecting didacticism, Mason creates the texture of the Vietnam experience. After spending the night in a swamp with her father's diary, Sam emerges knowing she will never really experience being "in country," but her search for her father leads her to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., where she sees not only her father's name, Dwayne E. Hughes, but also her own—Sam A. Hughes. The memorial represents America for Sam, just as it did for Mason when she first saw it. In Country records America's tragedy in Vietnam and reminds readers of the continuing loss from dangers experienced there, such as Agent Orange.

Mason's second novel, Spence and Lila (1988), follows the personal tragedy of Lila Culpepper's cancer. Married for over 40 years, Spence and Lila have reared their children and farmed their rural Kentucky farm. Now their future is threatened by a lump in Lila's breast. With the same unerring ear for dialogue that characterized her earlier work, Mason reveals the impatience, fear, loneliness, and love that wash over ordinary human beings as they try to deal with family and with old age, disease, and death. Lila's encounter with mortality helps her see how many people "won't or can't come out with their feelings," but despite their inability, Mason is able to reveal her inarticulate characters' emotions. Nancy, Spence and Lila's daughter, who also appears in "Nancy Culpepper" and "Lying Doggo" in Shiloh and Other Stories, is one of Mason's transients, while her sister, Cat, and her brother, Lee, are residents who stay close to their parents' farm.

With Love Life (1989), Mason returned to the short story form. The collection, which focuses on varying responses to love, has, like Shiloh and Other Stories, thematic interconnections that make it almost novelistic. Like those in her earlier work, the characters listen to rock and roll and watch MTV and live on the margins of the middle class in small-town Kentucky. Here, as in all of her work, Mason takes lives that seem on the surface to be barren and devoid of interest and invests them with will, dignity, and grace.

Mason's third novel, Feather Crown (1993), is a tribute to Kentucky and to Christine Wheeler, mother of the first recorded quintuplets born in North America. Already the mother of three, Christine struggles with moral issues as she also battles to keep her tiny children alive. A black woman is brought in as a nursemaid to help, since Christine cannot produce enough milk herself, and then the predators come, seeking to exploit the family. Like In Country, the novel records America's choices and the conflicts they create, as Mason chronicles day-to-day life for the struggling family. The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award and was listed by the New York Times as a 1993 Notable Book and by Publishers Weekly as one of the 20 best novels of the year.

In 1996 Mason joined Garrison Keillor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard in David Pichaske's Late Harvest: Rural American Writing, which contains the short story contributions of 35 contemporary authors in an anthology following America's firm ties to its rural roots. In 1998 Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason was released, collecting 17 of Mason's stories already seen in Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life. She also became the subject of a book-length work, Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction, by Albert Wilhelm, as part of Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction series. The book covers Mason's career from the first story up to early 1998.

Other Works:

Clear Springs: A Memoir (1999).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CA 53-56 (1975). CANR 11 (1984), 31 (1990). CBY (1989). CLC 28 (1984), 43 (1987). DLBY (1987). Major Twentieth Century Writers (1991).

Other references:

The American Claimant (1997). NYT Magazine (15 May 1988). Southern Literary Journal 19 (Spring 1987). Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers (1998). Southern Writers (1997). Wilhelm, A., Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998). Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). A World Unsuspected, Portraits of Southern Childhood (1990).

—MARY A. McCAY,

UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT