Private Lies: Bobbie Ann Mason [graphic graphicname="TIF00023466" orient="portrait" size="A"]

Bobbie Ann Mason was born near Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1940 and grew up on a dairy farm her father owned in rural Kentucky. Her early experiences in the country provided many of the settings for her later fiction. Mason attended the University of Kentucky, graduating in 1962. She left Kentucky immediately and moved to New York, where she earned a living writing for a variety of fan magazines. After several years of this work, she completed a master's degree program at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. She then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1972, writing her dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. Her early work was primarily academic and critical; however, she soon began writing and publishing short stories.

After submitting some twenty stories to The New Yorker magazine, Mason's...