Shiloh (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Bobbie Ann Mason was born on May 1, 1940, and grew up on a farm in western Kentucky outside the small town of Mayfield. She attended Mayfield High School and wrote for the school newspaper, and after graduation she went to the University of Kentucky.

Her first job out of college was writing for fan magazines in New York City. Eventually, she earned a master’s degree and then a doctorate before becoming a part-time college journalism professor. Before she began writing fiction, she published two books of nonfiction, one on the writer Vladimir Nabokov and the other titled The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.

Mason had nineteen stories rejected by the New Yorker magazine before her story “Offerings” was accepted. Mason models her characters on people she sees around her in rural Kentucky. Mayfield, like her fictional settings, is a landscape undergoing transition. In a Time review of Shiloh and Other Stories, R. Z. Sheppard coined the term “ruburb” to describe her settings. A ruburb is a place that is no longer rural but not yet suburban, a place where subdivisions of new houses pop up amongst corn fields.

In a 1985 interview with Lila Havens, Mason said, “I am generally more interested in the cultural effects on men than I am the women characters in my stories because women are in an incredible position right now. . . . I’m interested in these men who are immersed in a culture where they had a certain role, and now all of a sudden these women are going off and going to school, getting strange jobs. They’re walking out on the men and the men don’t know what to do. I feel there’s a lot of pathos in that.” Mason drew on this interest in her creation of Leroy Moffitt.

Mason has continued to produce a steady stream of well-received literature since her first book of fiction. Her work includes the novel In Country, a story about a Kentucky teenager’s search for her father who was killed in Vietnam, and her uncle who has been left crippled and haunted by the war. The novel was made into a movie in 1989 starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. Mason’s other works include the novel Spence + Lilac (1988) and Feather Crowns (1993). She has also written another collection of short stories, Love Life, published in 1989.