After her beginnings in 1908 in Albion, Michigan, and childhood in Whittier, California, M. F. K. Fisher continued her education at Illinois College, Occidental College, and UCLA, and at the University of Dijon in France. She is best known for her gastronomical writings—in 1937 her first book, Serve It Forth, was published, followed in 1941 by Consider the Oyster and in 1942 by How to Cook a Wolf (all of which were collected along with two later books into one volume entitled The Art of Eating, republished in Vintage). Mrs. Fisher has spent a good portion of her life as housewife, mother, and, of course, amateur cook; she has written novels, poetry, a screenplay; for a few years she was a vineyardist in Switzerland; and in the late forties she did a brilliant translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, which has also been republished. Two recent books are Among Friends, about growing up in Whittier and a book celebrating Marseille, A Considerable Town. For a long time Mrs. Fisher made her home in St. Helena, California, but for the past ten years or so she has lived near Glen Ellen, in the Sonoma Valley.