When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher's signature red boxes. Following on the success of Serve It Forth Set in the late 1930s,The Theoretical Foot And indeed, Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher and Dillwyn Parrish had been forced to return to Depression-era California where she wasstruggling to support them with her writing. Parrish--like the character in the story--was afflicted with Buerger's disease, for which there was only one effective painkiller, unavailable in the States. Faced with unrelieved agony and the threat of serial amputations, Parrish killed himself in August of 1941. Weeks later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the entire world was engulfed in war.Abstract: When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher's signature red boxes. Following on the success of Serve It Forth Set in the late 1930s,The Theoretical Foot And indeed, Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher and Dillwyn Parrish had been forced to return to Depression-era California where she was struggling to support them with her writing. Parrish--like the character in the story--was afflicted with Buerger's disease, for which there was only one effective painkiller, unavailable in the States. Faced with unrelieved agony and the threat of serial amputations, Parrish killed himself in August of 1941. Weeks later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the entire world was engulfed in war