Born on a dairy farm in western Kentucky, Bobbie Ann Mason possessed a love of literature from a young age. As a girl, she wrote stories based on detective novels and the characters of Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women. While earning her B.A. in English at the University of Kentucky in the late 1950s and early 1960s, she encountered the works of Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time and became even more serious about her work as a writer. After earning a master’s degree from SUNY Binghamton and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Connecticut, she began teaching writing at the collegiate level and publishing critical work, including a version of her doctoral dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s
Ada or Ardor and a critical text called
The Girl Sleuth, a feminist reading of Nancy Drew and other fictional girl detectives. After her short story “Shiloh” was published in
The New Yorker to great acclaim in 1980, Mason pivoted to writing fiction. She published her first collection of stories in 1982 and would go on to publish ten works of fiction, a memoir, and a biography of Elvis Presley over the course of her long career. The recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bobbie Ann Mason is often cited as a driving force behind the renaissance of the short story that took place in the 1980s.