Writing Career
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 is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky. Her short story Wish appears in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
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