Long Fiction:
Toilers of the Hills, 1928
Dark Bridwell, 1931
In Tragic Life, 1932
Passions Spin the Plot, 1934
We Are Betrayed, 1935
No Villain Need Be, 1936
Children of God: An American Epic, 1939
City of Illusion, 1941
The Mothers, 1943
Darkness and the Deep, 1943
The Golden Rooms, 1944
Intimations of Eve, 1946
Adam and the Serpent, 1947
The Divine Passion, 1948
The Valley of Vision, 1951
The Island of the Innocent, 1952
God or Caesar, 1953
Pemmican, 1956
Jesus Came Again, 1956
A Goat for Azazel, 1957
Peace Like a River, 1957
Tale of Valor, 1958
My Holy Satan, 1958
Orphans in Gethsemane, 1960
Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West, 1965
Poetry:
Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna, 1927
Nonfiction:
Suicide or Murder? The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis, 1962
Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, and Other Essays, 1963
Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, 1968 (with Opal L. Holmes)
Vardis Alvero Fisher was born on March 31, 1895, in Annis, Idaho, the son of Joseph and Temperance Thornton, Mormon converts. After spending his early life in a log cabin on the frontier, he received his A.B. degree at the University of Idaho and his M.A. and his Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. After graduation he taught at both universities; he also served in World War I as a corporal.
Fisher was married three times: to Leona McMurtrey in 1918, to Margaret Trusler in 1928, and to Laurel Holmes in 1940. During the years of the Depression he was the director of the Federal Writers’ Project in Idaho. He wrote two thorough descriptive works on Idaho, The Idaho Guide and The Idaho Encyclopedia, while working for the project.
His first two novels, Toilers of the Hills and Dark Bridwell, present Laurentian themes in a Western setting. His first work to attract attention was a thinly disguised biographical work, a tetralogy consisting of In Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot, We Are Betrayed, and No Villain Need Be. His best-known work is his long historical novel Children of God, which tells the story of the Mormon movement under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In 1939 the work won the Harper Novel Prize. City of Illusion is a story of the Comstock Lode, and The Mothers is a fictionalized account of the Donner Party tragedy. In a planned twelve-volume series called The Testament of Man, he attempted to trace the development of humankind from prehistoric days. Some of the titles in this series are Darkness and the Deep, The Golden Rooms, Intimations of Eve, Adam and the Serpent, and The Island of the Innocent. Pemmican is a novel of the early fur trade in the American Northwest.