In A Believing People, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert lament that the essay “has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected.” Early Mormons, they note, kept forceful diaries, wrote…
Among Mormons, autobiography has been for decades one of the most widespread modes of literary expression and can be related to the larger tradition of the genre in terms of the nineteenth-century origin of the…
Some have suggested that the most successful writing about the Mormon experience in the nineteenth-century comes from the frail and fading pages of the personal accounts recorded by first generation Mormons. From the first it…
Somewhere a book is waiting to be written—somewhere, deepburied in the Mormon unconscious, and all we Mormon writers are hard at work digging up the back yards of our past trying to find it. It…
Mormons are perhaps not as interesting to other people as they think they are. True, we have our history of strange practices and our epic migration to recommend us to the wider community, but the…
[1]David L. Wright did not begin to exist for me until more than a year after his death—in 1968 when I saw his play, Still the Mountain Wind. For other portions of the Mormon audience,…
When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…
The Latter-day Saints have been a source of sensationalistic subject matter for popular novelists almost since the beginning of the Church. But the Mormon novel as a treatment of Mormon materials from a Mormon point…
Bob Rees called it a “summit meeting of the Mormon literati,” the group which gathered April 20, 1976, in the conference room of the Church’s Historical Department. Actually it was just a group of people…
The bus trip from Utah had taken twenty-four hours and now, as the day darkened to evening, it was almost over. I had struggled the night before to sleep, but woke at each little village’s…