By the time she was in her late thirties, Mason started to write short stories. In 1980,
The New Yorker published her first story. "It took me a long time to discover my material", she said. "It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was." Mason has written about the working-class people of Western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism." Mason then went on to write a collection of short stories,
Shiloh and Other Stories. In 1985, she published her first novel,
In Country, which eventually was made into a feature film (see below). She followed
In Country with another novel in 1988,
Spence and Lila. She has since published several more short story collections (see below). In 2016, Mason became the second living author to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. 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. Mason's novel
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 a
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a
Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a
writer in residence at the University of Kentucky until 2011. Her short story "Wish" appears in
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader was published in 2018. ==Selected works==