Born on May 1, 1940, in Mayfield, Kentucky, Bobbie Ann Mason is a short-story writer, novelist and memoirist. She grew up on her family's dairy farm in rural Kentucky and draws on this background in the creation of her fiction. Notably, her characters are generally working-class people living in small, Southern, rural communities in The Changing Landscape of American Life.

Mason graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1962, earned a master's degree from SUNY Binghamton in 1966, and completed a PhD in literature at the University of Connecticut in 1972. On completion of her doctoral degree, she began working as a part-time journalism professor at Mansfield State College in Pennsylvania and as a full-time writer.

In 1980, The New Yorker published her first short story, “Offerings.” Her short stories continued to find homes in prestigious magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. In 1985, she published her first novel, In Country. This novel was produced as a feature film in 1989. The book is regarded by many as one of the most important American novels of its decade, offering a window into the aftermath of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl.