Mason's story "Shiloh" became the title story in her first collection of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, published in 1982. The volume was well received by critics and earned nominations for a National Book Critics Circle Award, an American Book Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Mason also won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first fiction. "Shiloh" has been widely anthologized in literature texts, and critics have demonstrated an ongoing interest in the story.

In a review of Shiloh and Other Stories in Newsweek, for example, Gene Lyons compared Mason to Arkansas novelist Charles Portis, best known as the author of True Grit, for her simple, straightforward prose. In another review in The New Republic, noted novelist and short story writer Anne Tyler praised Mason as "a full-fledged master of the short story." She also wrote that although Shiloh and Other Stories was Mason's first...