Ellen Gilchrist

Gilchrist was born in Mississippi and raised partly in Indiana and Kentucky before returning South, studying creative writing at Millsaps College under Eudora Welty and later at the University of Arkansas, where she began publishing poetry before turning to fiction in her forties.

Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories (1984) collects linked stories following recurring characters, especially the brash, self-destructive Rhoda Manning, through Southern girlhood, bad marriages, and unapologetic bids for pleasure and independence; it won the National Book Award the same year, a rapid vindication for a writer who had published her first collection only three years earlier.

She went on to write dozens more books built around the same recurring cast, working for decades from Fayetteville, Arkansas and New Orleans until her death in 2024.