A Southern writer often compared to Bobbie Ann Mason, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams, Ellen Gilchrist was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1935. In early adolescence, her father's duties with the Army Corps of Engineers caused the family to move around the country during World War II. At the age of nineteen, Gilchrist dropped out of school and ran away to marry the first of her four husbands. Her education was not resumed for sever al years; in 1967, at the age of thirty-two, she earned a B.A. from Millsaps College.

Gilchrist's writing career did not begin until she was forty with a stint as a contributing editor for a New Orleans newspaper. She joined poet Jim Whitehead's writing class at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. According to Gilchrist, the easy mix of social classes and the comfortable relationships between university professors and the members of...