Bobbie Ann Mason

Writer

• Born: May 1, 1940
• Place of Birth: Mayfield, Kentucky

AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT-STORY WRITER

Biography

Bobbie Ann Mason is a significant American short-story writer and novelist. She grew up in rural western Kentucky, where her father was a dairy farmer. During her childhood, she helped with farm chores, listened to popular music, and read literature such as Nancy Drew and other girl sleuth mysteries.

After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kentucky in 1962, she moved to New York City, where she worked for Ideal Publishing Company and wrote for popular magazines such as Movie Stars, Movie Life, and T.V. Star Parade. She received her Master of Arts degree in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. In 1969, she married Roger B. Rawlings, an editor and writer. In 1972, she received her PhD from the University of Connecticut. After receiving her doctorate, Mason began teaching at Mansfield State College in Pennsylvania, where she continued to teach until 1979. While teaching, she published two scholarly books, Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to “Ada” (1974) and The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (1974).

During the 1980s, Mason’s short stories began to appear in distinguished magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic. Her short-story collections Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) and Love Life (1989) also appeared in the 1980s. Throughout these stories, Mason provides a realistic picture of ordinary people, portraying working-class characters of rural western Kentucky who work at Kmart or Rexall Drugs, drive trucks, build houses, and clip grocery coupons. Mason’s portrayal of Kentucky folk stems partly from her memories of the people in her rural western Kentucky hometown. Lack of economical means often intensifies characters’ struggles, leading to divorce or drinking. The characters frequently lack direction in their lives, failing to recognize or act upon opportunities to improve their circumstances.

Mason’s short stories exemplify minimalism, a writing technique consisting of a pared-down writing style, realism, little surface plot, open-ended resolutions, and frequent first-person and present-tense narrative devices. Mason’s fiction is compared with that of minimalist writers such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Frederick Barthelme.

Strained romantic relationships are one subject that recurs throughout Mason’s short fiction. In “Shiloh,” one of Mason’s most acclaimed stories, Leroy, a truck driver, and his wife, Norma Jean, struggle to cope with their marriage, strained partially because of the death of their child years ago. “Big Bertha Stories” reflects a young couple’s attempt to cope with the psychological effects of the Vietnam War on the husband. The title story of Love Life (1988) depicts young Jenny and her aunt Opal, who sips alcohol and watches television. Both women consider their single marital status, and the story exemplifies differences between generations, the old, rural way of life, and that of the new generation, which occupies the modern enterprising world.

Mason is also well known for her portrayal of popular culture, especially her allusions to pop singers and her quotations of lyrics from popular tunes. The portrayal of popular culture is as apparent in her short novel In Country (1985) as in her short stories. Also set primarily in rural western Kentucky, In Country is told from the point of view of seventeen-year-old Sam Hughes, a young woman whose father was killed in Vietnam before she was born. Sam searches for family history as well as answers about the Vietnam War, along with her Uncle Emmett, who was wounded both physically and psychologically in the war. The novel includes many popular culture references: Sam and Emmett watch M*A*S*H, there are allusions to the Beatles, and a quotation from Bruce Springsteen’s album Born in the USA (1984) serves as an epigraph. Such references symbolize the attitudes of post–Vietnam War American culture, which is a significant theme in the novel.

In her second short novel, Spence + Lila (1988), Mason portrays the simple lives of Spence and Lila Culpepper, who live in rural Kentucky. When Lila has a mastectomy, she and Spence are forced to recognize a changing world, one full of modern technology and impersonal attitudes. The modern lifestyles of their three grown children are juxtaposed to the simple rural existence Spence and Lila have lived all their lives. One main subject of the novel is agrarian tradition versus industrialism, a lifestyle complicated by modern machines and corporations. Nancy Culpepper (2006) is a collection of stories centered on the Culpepper’s older daughter, who returns to the family farm in 2002 to better understand who she is and where she came from.

Feather Crowns (1993) is Mason’s second full-length novel, following In Country, published in 1985. Mason uses the same rural Kentucky setting in her earlier novel, and many of her short stories are used in this novel. In Feather Crowns, Mason depicts Christie and James Wheeler, a tobacco-farming couple. Spanning over sixty years, the novel begins in 1900 with Christie giving birth to quintuplets, an event that brings the couple national attention and ends with Christie’s retrospective insights about celebrity. The event brings reporters, doctors, and sightseers to the little town, again juxtaposing the simple life with modern industrial progress.

Mason’s other works include her memoir Clear Springs (1999); the story collection Zigzagging down a Wild Trail (2001); Elvis Presley (2003), a biography in the Penguin Lives series; and the novels An Atomic Romance (2005), The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011), and Dear Ann (2020). Her short stories in the twenty-first century include "The Girl in Purple" (2014, New Flash Fiction Review), "Clubbing" (2013, New World Writing), and "Whale Love" (co-authored with Meg Pokrass, The Nervous Breakdown). Mason has won several prestigious awards for her work, including the PEN/Hemingway Award (1983), the National Endowment for the Arts award (1983), the Kentucky Governor's Award in the Arts (2012), and the Kentucky Literary Award (2004 and 2012). 

Bibliography

Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “The Ambiguous Grail Quest in ‘Shiloh.’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 32, 1995, pp. 223–26.

Bobbie Ann Mason, www.bobbieannmason.net. Accessed 10 July 2024.

Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. “Never Stop Rocking: Bobbie Ann Mason and Rock-and-Roll.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture, vol. 42.1, 1988–89, pp. 5–17.

Eckard, Paula Gallant. Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.

Giannone, Richard. “Bobbie Ann Mason and the Recovery of Mystery.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 27, 1990, pp. 553–66.

Hennessey, Jackie. “Bobbie Ann Mason — Then and Now.” UConn Magazine, 16 Feb. 2021, magazine.uconn.edu/2021/02/16/bobbie-ann-mason-then-and-now. Accessed 10 July 2024.

Morphew, G. O. “Downhome Feminists in Shiloh, and Other Stories.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 21.2, 1989, pp. 41–49.

Pollack, Harriet. “From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women’s History, and Southern Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 28, 1996, pp. 95–116.

Price, Joanna. Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “Homegrown Fiction: Bobbie Ann Mason Blends Springsteen and Nabokov.” New York Times Biographical Service, vol. 19, 1988, pp. 563–65.

Ryan, Maureen. “Stopping Places: Bobbie Ann Mason’s Short Stories.” Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984.

Thompson, Terry. “Mason’s ‘Shiloh.’” The Explicator, vol. 54, 1995, pp. 54–58.

Wilhelm, Albert E. Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Bobbie Ann Mason: Searching for Home.” Southern Writers at Century’s End. Ed. Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997.

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason.” Midwest Quarterly, vol. 28.2, 1987, pp. 271–82.