A Welcoming Life
The M. F. K. Fisher Scrapbook
M. F. K. Fisher 
Annotations and compiled by Dominique Gioia


Description: Washington DC: Counterpoint, 1997; Stated First Printing, Original grey cloth in pictorial dust jacket, oversized oblong quarto format (11" x 8.5"), 128 pages with beautifully reproduced historical photographs.

A Welcoming Life captures in photographs and text the remarkable life of one of America's most beloved writers, M.F.K. Fisher. The physical and emotional landscapes of Fisher's life are here in image and anecdote: her childhood in a Quaker town in southern California just after the turn of the century; her sensual and intellectual awakening as a young woman in France in the 1930s; the uneven terrain of her adult life as writer, wife, daughter, parent; and finally the refuge of northern California's wine country, where Fisher spent her last years.

Condition: Very Good, minimal wear to cover and binding and a few pages have minimal notes and underlining; inside is clean, bright, square & tight in a price-clipped pictorial dust jacket.

Additional Information: Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher "M F K Fisher" (1908-1992) was a preeminent American food writer. She was also a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. She wrote some 27 books, including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. Two volumes of her journals and correspondence came out shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books are an amalgam of food literature, travel and memoir. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose."


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