Gilchrist was born on February 20, 1935, near Vicksburg, Mississippi, the second child and only daughter of Aurora (Alford) and William Garth Gilchrist. Much of her young life was spent moving across the South and Midwest as her father, an engineer, followed work.

She attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned a BA in philosophy and where she, at age nineteen, married Marshall Walker, an engineering student with whom she had three children. She divorced Walker (whom she later remarried and re-divorced, in addition to marrying and divorcing two other men before her writing career took off) and went on to earn another BA in 1967 from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi; there, she studied under famed Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. After doing some postgraduate work in creative writing at UA, she undertook various writing and journalism jobs and served as a contributing editor for New OrleansÕs Vieux Carre Courier from 1976 until 1979, when her first book of poetry, The Land SurveyorÕs Daughter, was published.

It was with a collection of short stories, however, that Gilchrist would make her reputation. The Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981) sold more than 10,000 copies in its first ten months and attracted tremendous critical acclaim, a minor coup for her publisher, the newly established University of Arkansas Press; in fact, Gilchrist had made the conscious decision to have her book published by UA Press rather than a commercial publisher. This success secured the writer a two-book contract with Little, Brown and Company. Her first novel, The Annunciation, received mixed reviews. The following year, Gilchrist published her award-winning 'Victory over Japan' and began a one-year stint as a commentator on National Public RadioÕs Morning Edition. Her commentaries were published in 1987 as 'Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist'.