To mark the one-hundredth anniversary of Vardis Fisher's birth, in 1995 the Pocatello Public Library sponsored an exhibit titled “Vardis Fisher: A Centennial View—1895-1995.” Funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, the Community Hospital Corporation of Idaho Falls, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the exhibit circulated in libraries throughout Idaho. Little other activity marked the anniversary, in Idaho or elsewhere.

Because Fisher had been deemed the first important novelist from the Rocky Mountain region, because of his work and his achievement as director of the Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, and because Fisher had been widely acknowledged as the dean of Western writers and was the first recipient of the Western Literature Association's Achievement Award, the celebration seems muted. It appears all the more so when compared to other centennial commemorations such as those of Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and...