SOURCE: An Introduction to Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, edited by Mark J. Madigan, University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 1-22.

In the following introduction to his edition of Fisher's collected correspondence, Madigan investigates Fisher's life and literary career, and surveys the many qualities of her character and writing that are revealed in her letters.

I

In 1948 Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) wrote to literary critic Albert L. Guerard about the University of Vermont's proposal to establish a collection of her papers at their Burlington campus:

Their idea is not a bad one I think, not to wait until an author has been dead twenty or thirty years, and his children and grandchildren have lost most of his papers—for who nowadays with families moving around all the time could possibly keep a mass of papers together?—but to collect them while the author...