Bobbie Ann Mason

Introduction

Bobbie Ann Mason

In the 1960s, if there was anything to report on Annette Funicello or Troy Donahue, author Bobbie Ann Mason knew it. She began her career writing articles about teen idols for magazines such as Movie Life and Star Parade. But in sharp contrast to her stint as pop-celebrity journalist, Mason earned a PhD in English from the University of Connecticut with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada. Her first book, The Girl Sleuth, was a work of criticism that tackled fictional female detectives such as Nancy Drew from a feminist perspective. Mason then published several stories and won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for outstanding works of short fiction. Her novel In Country is considered one of the most influential books of the 1980s.

Essential Facts

1. Mason has received many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
2. In Country was made into a film in 1989 that starred Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. Critics have not been overly kind to the adaptation.
3. Mason grew up on a 54-acre farm in Kentucky and continues to reside there. She is also currently a writer in residence at the University of Kentucky.
4. In high school, Mason was the coordinator of the Hilltoppers fan club, a male quintet from Kentucky that gained national popularity.
5. Mason’s book Clear Springs is her first memoir. She insists that it is not at all what she set out to write. “But that’s often true of a work,” she says. “Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something.”