SOURCE: “Gilchrist's Composite Personality and Story Cycle: Transforming Ernest Hemingway,” in her The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist, University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 23-56.

In the following essay, Bauer analyzes Hemingway's influence on Gilchrist's work, especially her story cycle and her use of a composite personality.

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”

It was Ernest Hemingway’s new book, and it had come from the book club the day she left North Carolina. She had been waiting for it to come for weeks. Now she opened it to the first page, holding it up to her nose and giving it a smell … “This is going to be a good...