The Golden Rooms

E-018: The Vanguard Press. Very Good. 1944. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Vanguard Press, New York, 1946. 331 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (spine ends are chipped and worn). Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. A psychological study of early man. Two different peoples are described: Harg and his family and Gode and his. Harg's people are evidently meant to be Neanderthals, but are overwrought as hulking, dwarfish, hairy, and brutish beasts. Gode and people, apparently Cro-Magnons, are lithe, swift, and tall giants. Harg's family and way of life are described first, then after a brief interaction the remainder of the book suddenly shifts to Gode's perspective. A lot of cultural advances that probably took millenia if not longer to accomplish are covered in a year or two. Harg discovers how to make fire. Gode almost succeeds in taming a wolf pup. And Gode is described as uttering the first human prayer. But the main interest of this book is not in its overdone physical details, but in the psychological goings-on in these two peoples and what happens when they interact. Fisher has an uncanny ability to draw for us a rather good description of what the thought processes of these people may have been like. Vardis Alvero Fisher, sometimes written Yardis 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). E-018; 9.0 X 6.0 X 1.0 inches; 256 pages .