Bobbie Ann Mason was born on May 1, 1940, and grew up on a farm in western Kentucky outside the small town of Mayfield. She attended Mayfield High School and wrote for the school newspaper, and after graduation she went to the University of Kentucky.

Her first job out of college was writing for fan magazines in New York City. Eventually, she earned a master's degree and then a doctorate before becoming a part-time college journalism professor. Before she began writing fiction, she published two books of nonfiction, one on the writer Vladimir Nabokov and the other titled The Girl Sleuth. A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and their Sisters.

Mason had nineteen stones rejected by the New Yorker magazine before her story "Offerings" was accepted. Mason models her characters on people she sees around her in rural Kentucky. Mayfield, like her fictional settings, is...