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Bobbie Ann Mason was born in 1942 and grew up on a dairy farm
outside of Mayfield, Kentucky.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1962 with a degree
in Journalism and took several jobs in New York City with various
movie magazines. She decided to extend her education by attending
graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she earned a
Ph.D. in literature. Her dissertation was published in 1974 in
paperback form under the titled "Nabokov's Garden".
By
her late thirties, Mason started to write short stories and 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. She
wrote a collection of short stories entitled
Shiloh and Other Stories and 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. Recently, she published a collection of stories called
Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason
Bobbie Ann Mason resides in rural
Kentucky.
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