American writer with a career of over 60 years in which she wrote hundreds of stories for the New Yorker as well as 15 books of essays and reminiscences, a translation, a novel, a screenplay, a book for children and dozens of travelogues. She wrote about food as a cultural metaphor, such books as “How To Cook a Wolf,” “The Gastronomical Me,” and “With Bold Knife and Fork.”
The eldest of four kids, she was raised in Whittier, California where her dad owned a newspaper. She learned to cook at home, where she also wrote continuously.
Her career fell roughly into three phases. In the late 1930s and through the ’40s, she published nine books. A dry spell followed of about a decade, during which her energies were absorbed by a complex family life. The depression that she endured through this period was coincident with the dissolution of her third marriage and the death of her mother. She moved back to Whittier to care for her ailing father and raise her two girls on her own. Then she entered two highly productive decades with over a dozen books. Her resilience, her accumulation of experience and her ever-expanding self-knowledge become profoundly moving as she aged.
In 1929 she married Alfred Fisher and moved to Dijon, France. Her first book, “Serve It Forth,” was published in 1937. She divorced Fisher that year and married painter Dillwyn Parrish; she was widowed four years later. Fisher then married literary agent Donald Friede in 1945 for two years. She lived in California, Switzerland and France, weathered three marriages and raised two daughters. She always said that her elder daughter, Anna, was adopted; in actuality, she had been born out of wedlock. Having and keeping an illegitimate child required conviction and courage at that time.
In 1952 she settled in the California vineyard country. In later years, her work became even more remarkable as she began losing her sight and her voice and was handicapped with arthritis and Parkinson’s Disease. She died on 22 June 1992 at age 83 in Glen Ellen, California, considered by critics as one of the great American writers of her century.
Link to Wikipedia biography