Births on March 31

Vardis Fisher, American author and academic (d. 1968)

Vardis Alvero Fisher (March 31, 1895 – July 9, 1968) was an American writer from Idaho who wrote popular historical novels of the Old West. After studying at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, Fisher taught English at the University of Utah and then at the Washington Square College of New York University until 1931. He worked with the Federal Writer's Project to write the Works Project Administration The Idaho Guide, which was published in 1937. In 1939, Fisher wrote Children of God, a historical novel focused on the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The novel won the Harper Prize. In 1940, Fisher moved to Hagerman, Idaho, and spent the next twenty years writing the 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cavemen to civilization. Fisher's novel Mountain Man (1965) was adapted in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972).

Fisher is often grouped with disaffected Mormon writers in Mormon fiction. Leonard Arrington and his graduate student John Haupt wrote that Fisher was sympathetic towards Mormonism, an idea that Fisher's widow, Opal Laurel Holmes, strongly repudiated. A more recent paper by Michael Austin suggests that Fisher's work was influenced by residual "scars" of his family heritage and Mormon upbringing and that these scars led to his incorporating into many of his novels the theme of a religious unbeliever trying to find ways to negotiate a life within a religious community.