Bobbie Ann Mason was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, on May 1, 1940. Her parents, Wilburn A. and Christianna Lee Mason, operated a small dairy farm, and Mason’s writing frequently reflects this rural heritage. Mason did farm chores but also explored popular culture. In 1954, she became the national president of the Hilltoppers fan club and attended concerts by this musical group throughout the South and Midwest. As editor and chief author of Hilltopper Topics, the fan club newsletter, Mason also displayed an early interest in writing.

After graduating from Mayfield High School, Mason attended the University of Kentucky, where she studied English and wrote for the school newspaper. During the summers she also worked as a reporter for her hometown newspaper, the Mayfield Messenger. Mason earned a B.A. degree in 1962 and was soon employed by Ideal Publishing Company in New York City as a writer for fan magazines. In moving from rural Kentucky to a big city and taking on the job of interviewing famous actors and musicians, Mason described herself as a victim of culture shock.

In 1963, Mason left New York City to enter graduate school at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and in 1966, she received an M.A. in English. Later that year she entered a Ph.D. program at the University of Connecticut. There she met Roger Rawlings, whom she married on April 12,1969.

Mason received her Ph.D. in 1972 and began teaching at Mansfield State College in Pennsylvania. Mason’s doctoral dissertation focused on Vladimir Nabokov, an author whose works are very different from Mason’s but whose intricate style she greatly admires. Her first book, Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to “Ada” (1974), is a scholarly work based on her dissertation. In 1975, she published a strikingly different scholarly book, The Girl Sleuth, in which Mason examines the self-reliant heroines of her favorite childhood books—Nancy Drew and other young female detectives. Thus, Mason’s experiences and her writings at this point in life display an unusual mixture of rural simplicity and urban sophistication, of popular culture and academic analysis.

In 1979, Mason gave up her teaching job and began to write full time. Although as a student she had contributed some stories to the University of Kentucky literary magazine, her first significant success as a writer of fiction did not come until February 18, 1980, when the New Yorker published her story “Offerings.” On October 20, 1980, the New Yorker published a second story, “Shiloh,” and Mason soon became a regular contributor of both fiction and nonfiction. Mason’s first collection of short stories, Shiloh, and Other Stories, appeared in 1982. It received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Mason’s first novel, In Country (1985), focused on the lingering effects within the United States of the Vietnam War. In 1983, during a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Mason had found in the list of names on the wall a variation on her own name—Bobby G. Mason. This accidental discovery, implying that she and other civilians at home were also casualties of the war, inspired the final section of In Country, where the book’s main characters make a pilgrimage to the memorial. In 1985, Mason also published “Big Bertha Stories,” a poignant account of how war experiences affected one soldier and his family. In 1989, Warner Bros. released a film version of In Country, and Mason received from the Vietnam Veterans of America a citation honoring her for increasing public understanding of the consequences of the war.

In 1988, Mason published