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Vardis Fisher (1895-1968), was born in a log cabin without running water, electricity, or heat, in Annis Idaho. He and his brother Vivian, were educated at home until the fourth grade, at which time they entered public school in Idaho. After graduating from the University of Utah in 1920, Vardis Fisher acquired a Master of Arts degree (1922) and a Ph.D. (1925) at the University of Chicago. He then returned to Utah, to teach English at the University of Utah (1925-1928), and then to New York University. He also taught as a summer professor at Montana State University (1932-1933), and directed the Idaho Writer's Project for the WPA (1935-1939). Vardis Fisher was married three times, to Leona McMurtrey, from 1917 to 1924, with whom he had two children before she commited suicide. His next marriage, to Margaret Trusler, was from 1928 to 1939, and produced one child. Finally, in 1940 he married Opal Laurel Holmes, which lasted for twenty-eight years until his own suicide in 1965.

A prolific writer, Vardis Fisher wrote thirty-eight books, ranging from western naturalism, to prodigious works on the nature of man and religion. He is most famous for his 1965 work Mountain Man, A Novel of Male and Female in the American West, which was an inspiration for the Sydney Pollack film, Jeremiah Johnson. His other western fiction includes The Mothers, 1943; Pemmican : a novel of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1956; Tale of Valor; a Novel of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1958. He wrote the semi-autobiographical series, cumulatively called the Vridar Hunter tetrology. Individually, these books were titled In Tragic Life, 1932; Passions Spin the Plot, 1934; We Are Betrayed, 1935; and No Villain Need Be, 1936.

Two of his most ambitious works concern Vardis Fisher's study of the Christian ethic, and Mormonism in particular. The son of an L.D.S. bishop, Fisher was an avowed atheist, and the study of the roots of Christianity and its effect on humankind were of enormous interest to him. He won the Harper Prize in 1939 for his study of Brigham Young and the Mormons in Children of God, but his opus might be considered "The Testament of Man" Series, in which he attempts to explore the entire history of mankind, with particular attention to religion. These books include Darkness and the Deep, 1943; The Golden Rooms, 1944; Intimations of Eve, 1946; Adam and the Serpent, 1947; The Divine Passion, 1948; The Valley of Vision, 1951; The Island of the Innocent, 1952; A Goat for Azazel, 1956; Jesus Came Again: A Parable, 1956; Peace Like a River: A Novel of Christian Asceticism, 1957; My Holy Satan, A Novel of Christian Twilight, 1958 and Orphans in Gethsemane, 1960.