Vardis Fisher

Life and works

Vardis Fisher was born in Annis, Idaho, near present-day Rigby, of a Mormon family and descent. After graduating from the University of Utah in 1920, Fisher earned a Master of Arts degree (1922) and a Ph.D. (1925) at the University of Chicago.

Fisher was an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah (1925–1928) while there he was a teacher of the great American West historian Wallace Stegner and at New York University (1928–1931), where he became friends with Thomas Wolfe. Fisher also taught as a summer professor at Montana State University (1932–1933) in Bozeman. Academic jobs were sharply reduced during the Great Depression.

Between 1935 and 1939, he worked as the director of the Idaho Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He wrote several books about Idaho. He was also a newspaper columnist for the Idaho Statesman and Idaho Statewide (which later became the Intermountain Observer).

One of his hobbies was house construction, and he built his own home in the Thousand Springs area near Hagerman, Idaho. Fisher did the wiring, masonry, carpentry and plumbing himself.

Marriage and family

Vardis Fisher married in 1917 after his second year in college, to Leona McMurtrey, whom he had courted since their childhood. They had difficulties in their marriage; he enlisted in the army in 1918. Later he became involved with another woman, Margaret Trusler, who was a fellow graduate student. Leona committed suicide on September 8, 1924.

He married Trusler in 1928. They had two sons, Grant and T. Roberts Fisher. They divorced in 1937, at her insistence.

He married his third wife, Opal Laurel Holmes, in 1940. She was his co-author on Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (1968). Opal Fisher died in 1995, leaving $237,000 from her estate to the University of Idaho for the creation of a humanities professorship.

Fisher died in 1968, at the age of 73, in Hagerman, Idaho.

Literary career

To write the Testament of Man (1943–1960) series, Vardis Fisher read more than 2,000 books on anthropology, history, psychology, theology and comparative religion. When the series was reprinted by Pyramid Books as mass-market paperbacks in 1960, it inspired the DC Comics editor Joe Orlando and the comic book Anthro, written and drawn by Howard Post and edited by Orlando.

His historical novel, Children of God, tracing the history of the Mormons, won the 1939 Harper Prize in Fiction. His novel Mountain Man (1965) was adapted for Sydney Pollack's film, Jeremiah Johnson (1972). The Mothers: An American Saga of Courage told the story of the Donner Party tragedy. Tale of Valor is a novel recounting the Lewis and Clark Expedition. God or Caesar? is his non-fiction book on how to write.

Criticism

Fisher was, perhaps, the most significant twentieth century novelist who was both a native and longtime resident of Idaho. He chafed at being compared with such better-known writers associated with the state as Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound. When appointed to head the Idaho branch of the Federal Writers Project under the WPA, Fisher quipped that he had been chosen because there were only three writers in Idaho, and he was the only one who was unemployed. Frederick Manfred, who was among Fisher's staunchest literary champions, declared that Dark Bridwell (1931) was Fisher's best novel and that Hemingway never wrote anything so good.

His twelve-volume Testament of Man series, to which Fisher devoted several decades of his life was, by and large, negatively received by the public as well as critics. As demonstrated by the collection of critical essays, Rediscovering Vardis Fisher (2000), the author still draws praise as well as criticism for his work. (The anthropologist Marilyn Trent Grunkemeyer, who read the Testament of Man series, was most critical of his work.)

Politics

His newspaper columns, written for various local and regional publications over three decades and often dealing with then-topical national and local issues, still make for lively reading. Fisher did not praise any U.S. president who served during his lifetime, regardless of political party. (Although he did not live beyond the primary season of 1968, Fisher had already made his low opinion of Richard M. Nixon clear during Nixon's vice-presidency.)

Fisher has been described as a "cranky Idaho Old Rightist." He was suspicious of all politicians and favored smaller, less-intrusive government. Grateful for work during the Depression, his opinion of the New Deal soured and he became a staunch critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he favored an America First stance, hoping to keep the U.S. out of World War II. Following the attack, he accepted the inevitability of war. He generally criticized U.S. foreign policy and opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam as early as the administration of John F. Kennedy.