Long Fiction:
In Country, 1985
Spence + Lila, 1988
Feather Crowns, 1993
Short Fiction:
Shiloh, and Other Stories, 1982
Love Life, 1989
Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason, 1998
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, 2001
Nonfiction:
Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to “Ada,” 1974
The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters, 1975, 1995
Clear Springs: A Memoir, 1999
Elvis Presley, 2002
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 B.A. from the University of Kentucky in 1962, she moved to New York City, where she worked for Ideal Publishing Co. and wrote for popular magazines such as Movie Stars, Movie Life, and T.V. Star Parade. She received her M.A. in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. In 1969 she married Roger B. Rawlings, an editor and writer, and in 1972 she received her Ph.D. 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” and The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.
During the 1980’s 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 and Love Life also appeared in the 1980’s. 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 economic 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 that consists of a pared-down writing style, realism, little surface plot, open-ended resolutions, and frequent use of 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 is 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 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 as it is 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 pop cultural 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, a major theme in the novel.
In her second short novel, Spence + Lila, 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 the notion of the agrarian tradition versus industrialism, a lifestyle complicated by modern machines and corporations.
Feather Crowns is Mason’s first full-length novel. The same rural Kentucky setting Mason uses in her earlier novels and many of her short stories is used in this novel. In Feather Crowns Mason depicts Christie and James Wheeler, a tobacco farming couple. Spanning more than 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 to modern industrial progress.