front cover of The Bedquilt and Other Stories
The Bedquilt and Other Stories
By Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Edited, Intro, & Afterword by Mark J. Madigan
University of Missouri Press, 1997

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the prolific author of more than forty books, including translations, juveniles, and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections, was one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Although her work has been unduly neglected for several decades, it is currently enjoying a revival of critical attention. This colorful collection ranges in subject from New Englanders to the Basques of France to the struggles of African Americans to gain equal rights. Through her stories, many of which received literary awards, Fisher examined the complexities of modern life in the United States and abroad.

In addition to her writing, Fisher had a lifelong involvement in charitable work and social causes--so much so that Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women of her time. As one of the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than two decades. Mark J. Madigan discusses Fisher's extraordinary life and work in an Introduction and Afterword.

Because of Fisher's rare ability to distinguish enduring concerns from merely topical issues, her work will provide lasting pleasure for generations of readers to come.

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front cover of Keeping Fires Night and Day
Keeping Fires Night and Day
Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Edited & Intro by Mark J. Madigan & Foreword by Clifton Fadiman
University of Missouri Press, 1993

Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women in America.  Among the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than three decades.  She helped shape the careers of such great writers as Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright.  A best-selling author herself, Fisher was also a deeply committed social activist.  In Keeping Fires Night and Day, Mark J. Madigan collects much of Fisher's copious correspondence.   With letters to Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Thurber, and E.B. White, he documents Fisher's personal and professional life and career in a way that no biography could.  Set against the American historical and cultural landscape from 1900 to 1958, these letters offer a firsthand account of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women. 

While Fisher's novels treated such conventional subjects as marriage and domestic life, her own life was anything but conventional.  When her best-selling novels made her the chief breadwinner in her marriage, her husband, John Fisher, quietly assumed the role of secretary and editor of her work.  Fluent in five languages, Dorothy Canfield Fisher founded a Braille press in France and introduced the educational methods of Dr. Maria Montessori to the United States.  She became a pioneering advocate of adult education and served as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education. 

In letters to friends, fans, and colleagues, Fisher discussed her homelife, her work, and the world around her.  Her passions and concerns-revealed in her correspondence with wit and poignancy-include the "New Woman' and the suffrage movement, racial discrimination and the emergence of the NAACP, the development of the national education system, two world wars, the depression, and the influence of book clubs in the literary market-place.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher "helped twentieth-century American literature to come of age," writes Clifton Fadimon in his Foreward.  Yet lasting recognition has eluded her.  In Keeping Fires Night and Day the distinctive voice of this gifted, intelligent and spirited woman is heard once again.

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