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The Author-Grim-faced Vardis Fisher's life, like his hero's, has been hard. Says he: "I try to portray life as I see and have seen it; and because I have seen so much that is brutal and ruthless, vulgar and unlessoned and because I believe that all aspects of human life belong in serious novels, my books are called brutal and ruthless. . . . The only good book, in my opinion, is an honest book, and no book, I am sure, can be honest and wholly bad."
Son and grandson of pioneers, Vardis Fisher was born in 1895 in Annis, Idaho, had the same kind of stony childhood and struggling education he writes about. After taking his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (1925), he went back to the University of Utah as instructor in English, then to New York University. With his second wife, Margaret Trusler, whom he married in 1929, he now lives on his father's ranch, near Ririe, Idaho. The titles for the first three volumes of his tetralogy were taken from his admired George Meredith (Modern Love) :
. . . In Tragic, life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.