Clear Springs, Bobbie Ann Mason
Clear Springs, Bobbie Ann Mason
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
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Clear Springs
A Family Story

Author: Bobbie Ann Mason, Random House Inc.

Narrator: Janet Metzger

Unabridged: 13 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/01/2020


Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
From acclaimed author Bobbie Ann Mason, her Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir chronicling three generations of her Kentucky lineage, spanning a century in the life of an American family.

""Mason gets to the heart of a whole generation.... She can write the hard truth about home, love, loss.... Immensely satisfying."" —New York Times Book ReviewPeople love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family—a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.Spanning decades, Clear Springs gracefully weaves together the stories of Mason's grandparents, parents, and her own generation. The narrative moves from the sober industriousness of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the countercultural 1960s; from a New York fan magazine to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a county poorhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie.In the process of recounting her own odyssey—the story of an isolated girl who dreamed of distant places—Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century. Ultimately, Clear Springs is a heartfelt portrait of an extended family, and a profound affirmation of the importance of family love. 

About Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of works of fiction, including The Girl in the Blue Beret, In Country, An Atomic Romance, and Nancy Culpepper. The groundbreaking Shiloh and Other Stories won the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won two Southern Book Awards and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. Former writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, she lives in Kentucky.

About Random House Inc.

Jean Strouse won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy for her biography Alice James. She lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on March 04, 2024

Clear Springs is the town at the center of the region of rural western Kentucky where novelist Bobbie Ann Mason was born and raised. And as Mason describes the region in her 1999 memoir Clear Springs, it was an area that offered the attractions of a slow-paced, rural life lived close to nature. At t......more

Goodreads review by Caren on April 24, 2018

This author was the keynote speaker at this year's Southern Literary Festival earlier this month, held not so far from the area where she grew up. While the book is nearly twenty years old now, there is a timeless quality to some of her descriptions of farm life. She was born in 1940, so before the......more

Goodreads review by Harriett on October 20, 2022

I read "Feather Crowns" a long time ago, and was very impressed. This 1999 memoir manages to show her own childhood and also show a universal childhood. She was born in 1940 and grew up in rural Kentucky on a family farm.......more