A short life of the author
Bobbie Ann Mason (born 1 May 1940) is an American novelist and short story writer whose fiction is rooted in the rural and small-town South — specifically western Kentucky, the region where she was born and raised — and whose characters are the people that most American literary fiction ignores: truck drivers, factory workers, Vietnam veterans, grandmothers who watch Phil Donahue, teenagers who shop at Walmart, and couples whose marriages are quietly disintegrating under the pressure of economic change and cultural dislocation. She is one of the finest practitioners of what came to be called “dirty realism” or “K-Mart realism” — a style of writing, prominent in the 1980s, that rendered ordinary American lives with a stripped-down, unadorned precision that owed debts to Hemingway and Chekhov.
Early Life
Mason grew up on a dairy farm near Mayfield, Kentucky. Her parents were tobacco and dairy farmers, and her childhood was shaped by the rhythms of agricultural life — rhythms that were rapidly disappearing as the South industrialised and suburbanised. She attended the University of Kentucky, earned a PhD in English from the University of Connecticut with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov, and taught at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania before turning to fiction.
Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)
Mason’s debut collection announced a major talent. The stories are set in western Kentucky and follow characters whose lives are being transformed — often painfully — by the modernisation of the South: the arrival of shopping malls and fast food, the disappearance of farms and small businesses, the impact of television and popular culture on communities that had been isolated for generations.
The title story follows Leroy Moffitt, a truck driver disabled in an accident, and his wife Norma Jean, who has begun taking bodybuilding classes. Their marriage is falling apart, and a visit to the Shiloh Civil War battlefield becomes a metaphor for the quiet war between them. The story is a masterpiece of compression — everything that matters happens in the spaces between what the characters say.
The collection won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In Country (1985)
Mason’s first novel follows Samantha (Sam) Hughes, a seventeen-year-old Kentucky girl, through the summer of 1984 as she tries to understand the Vietnam War and its impact on her family. Her father was killed in Vietnam before she was born; her uncle Emmett, a veteran, lives with her and suffers from mysterious health problems that may be related to Agent Orange exposure. The novel culminates in a trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington — a scene of extraordinary emotional power.
In Country was praised for its rendering of working-class Kentucky life, its sensitive treatment of the war’s long aftermath, and its pitch-perfect dialogue. It was adapted into a 1989 film starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd.
Feather Crowns (1993)
Mason’s most ambitious novel is set in 1900 Kentucky and tells the story of Christianna Wheeler, a farm woman who gives birth to quintuplets — a medical sensation that draws journalists, curiosity seekers, and commercial exploiters to the family farm. The novel explores the collision between rural isolation and modern celebrity culture with the historical depth and narrative sweep of a nineteenth-century novel.
Clear Springs (1999)
Mason’s memoir of her Kentucky childhood and family history is one of the finest works of Southern autobiography — a portrait of a vanishing way of life written with the same precision and sympathy that characterise her fiction.
Critical Standing
Mason is a central figure in the literary movement that brought working-class American experience into the mainstream of serious fiction in the 1980s. Her work is sometimes compared to Raymond Carver’s, but where Carver is elliptical and bleak, Mason is warmer, more detailed, and more interested in the specific textures of her characters’ lives — the brand names, the television shows, the shopping trips that constitute the fabric of contemporary American existence. Her best stories belong permanently in the American canon.
Collecting Mason
Shiloh and Other Stories (1982, Harper & Row) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible, bringing $100–$300. In Country (1985, Harper & Row) is also sought. Signed copies are available from literary events.