Bobbie Ann Mason
Encyclopedia : B : BO : BOB : Bobbie Ann Mason
Bobbie Ann Mason (born 1940) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic.
Mason was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, where she grew up on her parents' 54-acre dairy farm. She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1962 with a B.A. in journalism. She then moved to New York City, where she worked for Movie Life and T.V. Star Parade magazines, writing celebrity profiles. At this time she also entered graduate school and received an M.A. from State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Mason subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut in 1972. From 1972 until 1979, Mason taught at Mansfield College in Pennsylvania.
Writing Career
Mason's dissertation, a critique of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor, was published in 1974. A year later, she published The Girl Sleuth, a feminist assessment of Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and other fictional girl detectives. Mason's first volume of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories, appeared in 1982 and won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for outstanding first works of fiction. In Country is often cited as one of the seminal literary works of the 1980s. Its protagonist attempts to come to terms with a number of important generational issues, ranging from the Vietnam War to consumer culture. A film version was produced in 1989, starring Emily Lloyd as the protagonist and Bruce Willis as her uncle.Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Mason has received an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky.
Selected works
Short story collections:- Love Life (1989)
- Midnight Magic (1998)
- Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002)
- In Country (1985)
- Feather Crowns (1993)
- Spence + Lila (1998)
- An Atomic Romance (2005)
- Clear Springs: A Memoir (1999) ISBN 0679449256
- Elvis (2002)
Further reading
- [Price, Johanna, ''Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason, University of South Carolina Press, 2000]
- ["Understanding" review by Barbara Marshall]
External links
- [Sims, Michael, "Facing Toward Home," Interview with Mason]
- [Bibliography of periodical articles by UVA professor]
- [Bobbie Ann Mason]
- [1995 answers by Mason to Kentucky high school students]
- [1985 and 1989 audio interviews with Bobbie Ann Mason] by Don Swaim
- [links to materials by Swiss Educational Team]
- [links to interviews, features and review] at the New York Times
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.