Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Mary Frances KENNEDY
Obituary: M.F.K. Fisher, the peripatetic author whose crystalline prose and keen observations elevated food writing to the high art of literature, has died at 83.
Mrs. Fisher had suffered from Parkinson's disease and arthritis. She died Monday at her home in Glen Ellen, Calif., said one of her two daughters, Kennedy Wright.
From her childhood through old age and across thousands of miles in between, Mrs. Fisher was enthralled by food. But critic Frances Taliaferro observed that calling her a leading food writer was like calling Cezanne "the leading painter of apples."
She used food as a means of exploring life, and the passion she displayed for an eggplant or an apple seemed more truly concerned with people and their hunger, the real subject of most of her widely-acclaimed books and articles.
Her prose was marked by imagery as rich and fresh as the food she often described.
Born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Mich., her father was a small-town newspaperman and her mother a "prairie princess." Both were from Iowa families studded with journalists.
In 1929, after some college, she married Albert Fisher, a minister's son and scholar of English literature. They moved to Dijon, France where, the author later wrote, she spent "two shaking and making years," learning about food and life.
Returning to California in 1932, Mrs. Fisher began writing. In 1934 she sold her first magazine story, using her initials so her father would not know what she had done, she said. In 1937 she published "Serve it Forth," a collection of essays that was her first book.
In 1938 she divorced her husband and soon married Dillwyn Parrish, a painter and friend who helped get "Serve it Forth" published. A cousin of Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish, he died three years later. Her third marriage, to publisher Donald Friede, ended in divorce in 1951, after the couple had two children.
Her recent works include "As They Were," published in 1982 but containing essays written over the preceding 40 years; "Sister Age," a 1983 story collection that often verges on reminiscence, particularly in dealing with Aix-en-Provence, a French city sacred for the author; "Boss Dog" in 1990 and "Long Ago in France," 1991.
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