Vardis Fisher and the Beginnings of Mormon Regionalism

This chapter sets Fisher’s early work in the context of the regional literature movement in American literature—a movement that also included such writers as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe, Fisher’s regional fiction—including his autobiographical tetralogy—is set in the Antelope region of Southern Idaho. The Antelope books include Fisher’s autobiographical tetralogy and other works modeled on members of his family, but they also incorporate an entire fictional storyworld much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. The chapter argues that Fisher’s Antelope fiction constitutes the first significant example of regionalism in the area that Donald W. Meinig identified as the “Mormon Culture Region.”