Bobbie Ann Mason | |
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Born | Mayfield, Kentucky, U.S. | May 1, 1940
Education | University of Kentucky (BA) Binghamton University (MA) University of Connecticut (PhD) |
Notable works | Nabokov's Garden: A Guide to Ada (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974) The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1975) Shiloh and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1982; London: Chatto & Windus, 1982) In Country (New York: Harper & Row, 1985; London: Chatto & Windus, 1986) Clear Springs: A Memoir, Random House (New York, NY), 1999 The Girl in the Blue Beret, Random House (New York, NY), 2011Contents |
Notable awards | PEN/Hemingway Award, 1983 National Endowment for the Arts award, 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1984 |
Bobbie Ann Mason (born May 1, 1940) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. [1]
A child of Wilburn and Christianna (Lee) Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky, with four siblings and her great niece Mya Mason. [2] As a child she loved to read with encouragement from her parents; however, choices were limited. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books she read in adolescence titled The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters. [3] Mason credits her time at a grade school in Cuba, Kentucky with influencing her adult fictional characters. [4]
After high school, Mason went on to major in English at the University of Kentucky. [2] After graduating in 1962, she worked for a fan magazine publisher in New York City, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight for movie magazines that Mason describes as "fluff." [5] She earned her master's degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was published as Nabokov's Garden two years later while Mason taught at Mansfield State College (now Mansfield University). [2]
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." [6]
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. [4]
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. [7]
Nancy Drew is a fictional character appearing in several mystery book series, movies, video games, and a TV show as a teenage amateur sleuth. The books are ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Created by the publisher Edward Stratemeyer as the female counterpart to his Hardy Boys series, the character first appeared in 1930 in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, which lasted until 2003 and consisted of 175 novels.
The Stratemeyer Syndicate was a publishing company that produced a number of mystery book series for children, including Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others. It published and contracted the many pseudonymous authors who wrote the series from 1899 to 1987, when it was sold to Simon & Schuster.
The Dana Girls was a series of young adult mystery novels produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The title heroines, Jean and Louise Dana, are teenage sisters and amateur detectives who solve mysteries while at boarding school. The series was created in 1934 in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of both the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and the Hardy Boys series, but was less successful than either. The series was written by a number of ghostwriters and, despite going out-of-print twice, lasted from 1934 to 1979; the books have also been translated into a number of other languages. While subject to less critical attention than either Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, a number of critics have written about the series, most arguing that the Dana Girls' relative lack of success was due to the more dated nature of the series.
Edward L. Stratemeyer was an American publisher, writer of children's fiction and founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He was one of the most prolific writers in the world, penning over 1,300 books and selling more than 500 million copies.
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Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Kmart realism, also termed "low-rent tragedies", is a form of minimalist literature found in American short fiction that became popular in the 1980s.
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Andrew E. Svenson was an American children's author, publisher, and partner in the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Under a variety of pseudonyms, many shared with other authors, he wrote and cowrote more than 70 books for children, including in the Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and Honey Bunch series. He wrote the series The Happy Hollisters using the pseudonym Jerry West and The Tolliver Family as Alan Stone.
Shiloh and Other Stories is a 1982 collection of short stories written by American author Bobbie Ann Mason. The collection won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for fiction. The collection brought Mason her first critical acclaim.
The Feminist Press at CUNY is an American independent nonprofit literary publisher of the City University of New York, based in New York City. It primarily publishes feminist literature that promotes freedom of expression and social justice.
Connie Blair is the central character in a series of 12 mystery novels for adolescent girls written by Betsy Allen and published by Grosset & Dunlap between 1948 and 1958.
The Honey Bunch series of books were part of the Stratemeyer Syndicate's production of 20th century children's books featuring adventurous youngsters, which included the series Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. This series was written under the pseudonym Helen Louise Thorndyke, and published for most of its duration by Grosset & Dunlap. The series began in 1923 and chronicled a young girl named Honey Bunch on her various trips and adventures. Along with Laura Lee Hope's series Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue, it was one of their most famous series for younger children.
Barbara Ann Neely was an African-American novelist, short story writer and activist who wrote murder mysteries. Her first novel, Blanche on the Lam (1992), introduced the protagonist Blanche White, a middle-aged mother, domestic worker and amateur detective. The Mystery Writers of America named her their 2020 Grand Master winner.
Becky Birtha is an American poet and children's author who lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She is best known for her poetry and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships, often focusing on topics such as interracial relationships, emotional recovery from a breakup, single parenthood and adoption. Her poetry was featured in the acclaimed 1983 anthology of African-American feminist writing Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith and published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has won a Lambda Literary award for her poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to further her literary works. In recent years she has written three children's historical fiction picture books about the African-American experience.
Ann Allen Shockley is an American journalist, editor and author, specialising in themes of interracial lesbian love, especially the plight of black lesbians living under what she views as the "triple oppression" of racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has also encouraged libraries to place special emphasis on Afro-American collections.
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Joanne Schultz Frye is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
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