SOURCE: Attebery, Louie W. “Vardis Fisher.” In A Literary History of the American West, sponsored by The Western Literature Association, pp. 862-86. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Attebery discusses Fisher's works from five distinct periods of his life and literary development.

Any serious study of the literature of the American West, wrote Wallace Stegner, will have to include the works of Vardis Fisher.¹ The assertion is proper. From 1927 with Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna to 1968 with the massive Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, Fisher explored his region, his cultural heritage, and his own past, creating a legacy that is an invitation to progress with him from the particulars of time and place to the universal.

In the course of a fretful, productive life, Fisher wrote more than thirty books, the exact number a quiddity since he co-authored one...