Bobbie Ann Mason was born in rural Kentucky in 1940. Her father was a farmer, and Mason grew up on the dairy farm he owned. She attended the University of Kentucky and graduated in 1962. Immediately after graduation, Mason moved to New York City where she took a job writing for fan magazines. She earned both a master's degree from the State University of New York-Binghamton in 1966, and a doctoral degree in English from the University of Connecticut in 1972. After a number of years of writing literary criticism and nonfiction, she began to write short stories.

Her story "Offerings" was published in the New Yorker in 1980. "Residents and Transients" first appeared in the Boston Review in August of 1982 before being included in Mason's first collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories. The volume received nominations for a PEN-Faulkner award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The...