MFK FisherMFK’s informal education undoubtedly had a far greater impact on her writing career than her formal education. She loved reading as a child, and began writing poetry at the age of five. Her family had a vast home library, and her mother provided her access to many other books. Later, she wrote for her father’s newspaper, and she would draft as many as fifteen stories a day.

Food and good relationships became early passions in her life. She once said “I decided at the age of nine that one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people.”

In 1928 she married Alfred Fisher and they relocated to France, where MFK studied painting and sculpture while they visited all the restaurants they could. In 1932 they returned to California, where she began publishing short essays on gastronomy, which were later collected in her first book, Serve it Forth. For the next twenty years, during which she remarried twice, MFK continued to write, alternating homes between California and Europe.

MFK came to Glen Ellen in 1971, when her friend David Bouverie built a home on his ranch to her specifications, which she called “Last House”. She continued to visit France, but Glen Ellen remained her home until her death in 1992.