(born 1940) Born in Kentucky Mason worked as a journalist in New York before receiving a PhD in English from the University of Connecticut in 1972. Her first story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), describes the lives of rural people of her native state, and won the Ernest Hemingway Award in 1983. Mason’s most famous novel, In Country (1985), recounts the efforts of a young Kentucky woman to come to grips with her father’s death in Vietnam before she was born, and how her search for meaning helps others deal with the impact the war has had, and continues to have, on lives.