The regal marble lobby of the New York Public Library was alive with literary swells. Strolling about like spectators at Ascot opening day, the elegant crowd waited for word of the winner of the esteemed American Book Award in fiction.
The strong favorite for the coveted prize, Alison {Foreign Affairs) Lurie, took a waiting position at the far edge of the throng. Nominee Philip (The Anatomy Lesson) Roth, true to his elusive image, remained out of sight in Israel. The dark horse, Ellen Gilchrist, a saucy 49-year-old Southerner was poised for action in a ruby-red velvet suit. As the crowd burst into applause when her name was called out, Gilchrist trotted to the microphone to claim the award and $10,000 in prize money. After graciously acknowledging her competition, she stopped and the audience stirred expectantly. Apparently at a loss what to do next, Gilchrist then blurted out, "Uh, I brought my Lionel Richie tape with me, if anyone wants to listen to it."
Gilchrist, until now an unknown talent except to a small, discerning following, won her prize for Victory Over Japan (Little Brown, $15.95), a collection of pungent and funny short stories. Her heroines are free-spirited Southern belles, the fastest-talking hellions below the Mason-Dixon line. No Scarlett O'Haras, these damsels have been known to juice up on amphetamines. One loses her virginity in the backwoods at age 14, just to spite her daddy, and another had blithely robbed a New Orleans bar wearing nun's garb. Reflecting on her raffish characters, Gilchrist says: "I give them things that belong to me. I give them my old black lace dress or my best friend's eyes or a poem I wrote a year ago or one of my old boyfriends or whatever I think they need."
Gilchrist's upbringing was more traditional than that of her literary creations. Her earliest memories are of an idyllic family life on a Mississippi plantation in Issaquena County, near Greenville. "Mississippi people of my generation," says Gilchrist, "were mothered by black people. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. I will feel their hands on me until I die." As a child, Ellen spent a lot of time with her make-believe friend, Jimmy, who always wore a nice neat suit. "My mother knew him well," says Ellen. "She would set a place for him at the table if I told her to. This is the reason I was wildly imaginative."
At the beginning of World War II Ellen's father, William, an engineer, was hired to build airports for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Over the next few years the family moved in and out of small towns in Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. At 14, Ellen landed a job on the local paper in Franklin, Ky., writing a column called "Chit and Chat About This and That." Ever precocious, she ran off to the North Carolina mountains at 19 after dropping out of school, and married Marshall Walker, an engineering student, who became the father of her children: Marshall, now 28; Garth, 27, and Pierre, 23. In 1966, by then divorced, Ellen enrolled at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., where she took a creative writing class taught by Eudora Welty.
Inspired by Welty's teaching, Gilchrist devoted herself to short stories and poetry. Sometimes, the writing proceeded in fits and starts—as did her personal life in those years. After a second try at marriage with an Alabama judge she remarried her first husband and then wed a New Orleans lawyer, whom she divorced in 1980. She has been living alone ever since in Fayetteville, Ark. It was there that she completed her first published collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. (Gilchrist's only novel, The Annunciation, came out with little fanfare in 1983.)
This winter Gilchrist has been sampling Yankee life while living and writing in a friend's Manhattan apartment. "I love New York, but I wish they wouldn't put clothes on their dogs," she says. "I saw a German shepherd in a trench coat with epaulets last Sunday." But before spring planting she'll be back in Fayetteville, where she lives in a small frame house in the mountains. Life in the Ozarks is easygoing, she reports, and she doesn't think winning the award will change her life—certainly not among her neighbors. "You could win the Nobel Prize," she says, "and nobody would pay any attention. There's an old saying in Fayetteville that there are no stars in town." Correction: There is one now.
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