BIOGRAPHY

    Bobbie Ann Mason was born in 1942 and grew up on her father's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky.  As a child she loved to read, so her parents always made sure she had books.  These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries.  She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled "The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters."
    After high school, Bobbie Ann Mason went on to major in journalism at the University of Kentucky.  After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight.  She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars.  Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972.  Her dissertation was later published in paperback form titled "Nabokov's Garden" in 1974.
    By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories.  In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story. "It took me a long time to discover my material," she says.  "It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things.  And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about.  I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was."  Mason writes about the working-class people of western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism."
    Mason then went on to write a collection of short stories entitled "Shiloh and Other Stories.  She won the 1982 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for this work.  In 1985 she wrote her first novel, "In-Country."  She followed "In Country" with another novel titled "Spence and Lila" in 1988.  She just recently published a new collection of stories called "Midnight Magic."
    Bobbie Ann Mason is one of the country's leading fiction writers.  She reportedly now resides in rural Kentucky.