Clore, Mabel S.

Vardis Fisher was born on March 31, 1895, in Annis, Idaho, to a family of Mormon pioneers. He was the first child of a man who preferred the wilderness and a woman who desired civilization. In 1901 Fisher's family moved to a remote river basin home in Southeastern Idaho. The Antelope Hills were totally isolated, and for the next five years (until he was sent to school) Fisher was 'imprisoned by the wilderness" (according to biographer Wayne Chatterton). After graduating from Rigby High School in 1915, Fisher attended the University of Utah, where he married his childhood sweetheart, Leona McMurtrey. At the outset of World War I, Fisher enlisted as an officer candidate in the Air Force, resigned, and was then drafted, serving two years in the Army. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Utah in 1920. With his wife and two sons, he moved to Illinois to pursue graduate work in English Literature at the University of Chicago.

Fisher's writing skills were highly acclaimed by both universities. He received his masters degree in 1922 with a thesis on Daniel Defoe and London low life. His academic accomplishments, however, were overshadowed during this period by the suicide of his wife in 1924. Fisher completed his PhD, magna cum laude, in 1925 and returned with his sons to Salt Lake City, Utah, to assume a teaching career at the University of Utah. Stifled by religious and academic pressures for conventionality and conformity, Fisher resigned in 1928. In search of intellectual freedom, he accepted a position as assistant professor at New York University.

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