Happy Birthday, M. F. K. Fisher

July 3, 1908, Albion, MI | Died June 22, 1992, Glen Ellen, CA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates essayist M. F. K. Fisher on the 117th anniversary of her birth. The translator of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, Fisher was a prolific essayist and memoirist. W. H. Auden called her “America's greatest writer.” As critic Raymond Sokolov wrote, “In a properly run culture, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher would be recognized as one of the great writers this country has produced in this century.”

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M. F. K. Fisher, 1946, Arni.

“Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...”

M. F. K. Fisher on the cover of her last book, the third volume in a trilogy.

“People ask me: Why do you write about food? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”

M. F. K. Fisher authored over twenty-seven books. Serve It Forth (Harper, 1937) was her first collection of essays. With Bold Knife and Fork (Putnam) appeared in 1969. Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (Prentice Hall, 1991) was one of her last books. In 1991, the New York Times editorial board wrote, “Calling M.F.K. Fisher, who has just been elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a food writer is a lot like calling Mozart a tunesmith. At the same time that she is celebrating, say, oysters (which lead, she says, "a dreadful but exciting life") or the scent of orange segments drying on a radiator, she is also celebrating life and loneliness, sense and sensibility.”

First published essay:

• “Pacific Village,” Westways, 1935.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Art of Eating, 50th anniversary edition, Harvest Books, 2004 (originally published by World Books, 1954). Includes the collected essays from Serve It Forth (1937), Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943), and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949).

• M.F.K. Fisher, A Life in Letters: Correspondence 1929-1991, selected and compiled by Norah K. Barr, Marsha Moran and Patrick Moran, Counterpoint, 1997.

• To Begin Again: Stories and Memoirs 1908-1929, Pantheon, 1992.

• Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories 1933-1941, Pantheon, 1993.

• Last House: Reflections, Dreams and Observations 1943-1991, Pantheon, 1995.

See also:

Visit the M.F.K. Fisher website, a project of the M. F. K. Fisher Literary Trust

Watch the trailer for The Art of Eating: The Life of M. F. K. Fisher, 2023; follow the FaceBook page for the film to get announcements of online and other screenings.

Watch the New School’s panel discussion, “M. F. K. Fisher: Poet of the Appetites,” 2010, featuring Amanda Hesser, Judith Jones, Joan Reardon, and Kennedy Golden (Fisher’s daughter).

Read “She Was Not a Food Writer,” Jim Lewis, Alta, 2022.

Read “M. F. K. Fisher’s Lifetime of Joyous Eating,” Ruth Reichl, Literary Hub, 2019.

Read Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher, edited by David Lazar, University of Mississippi Press, 1992.

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