SOURCE: “The Miracle of Realism: The Bid for Self-Knowledge in the Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1, Fall, 1983, pp. 101-14.

In the following essay, Thompson discusses where the search for self-knowledge leads several of Gilchrist's protagonists.

Few writers can achieve with a first collection of short stories published by a university press the kind of instant popular success and critical acclaim Ellen Gilchrist won with In the Land of Dreamy Dreams: Not only did it immediately sell out its first printing, the collection was literally the talk of New Orleans, selling many copies by word of mouth and winning for its author a substantial contract with a notable publisher for a novel and another collection of stories. Gilchrist’s regional success has been explained in much the same way the regional success of writers like Walker Percy, Eudora Welty and, more recently, John Kennedy Toole...