M. F. K. Fisher, American author (died 1992)

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede, writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and a translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose." In 1991 the New York Times editorial board went so far as to say, "Calling M.F.K. Fisher, who has just been elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a food writer is a lot like calling Mozart a tunesmith. At the same time that she is celebrating, say, oysters or the scent of orange segments drying on a radiator, she is also celebrating life and loneliness, sense and sensibility."