In a chapter from her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead describes the rejection she experienced during her freshman year at DePauw, a small midwestern college. Students had come to DePauw, in Mead’s words, “for fraternity…
When we immigrated to Utah in 1967, Elder Mark E. Peterson said to my husband, “I hope you won’t be like so many converts who come to Zion. They think we should be perfect, and…
Fawn McKay Brodie is known in Mormon circles primarily for her controversial 1945 biography of Joseph Smith—No Man Knows My History. Because of this work she was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of…
For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses
Richard Poll, hands clasped, leaned forward and strained to clarify, with labored sensitivity, two kinds of ideal-typical Mormons, the Iron Rod member and the Liahona Saint, whose characteristics he had recently detailed in a controversial…
The excellence of the King James Version of the Bible does not need fresh documentation. No competent modern reader would question its literary excellence or its historical stature. Yet compared to several newer translations, the…
Comparisons, they say, are odious, yet I find it difficult to comment on Larry E. Morris’s new novel, The Edge of the Reservoir, without referring to Anne Tyler’s latest novel, Breathing Lessons (New York: Alfred…
Each year first-class presses add to the growing number of excellent Mormon monographs. Twenty-nine major studies appeared in 1988 alone. These two volumes from the University of Missouri Press and the University of Oklahoma Press…
The attitude of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints toward lawyers and the legal process is well documented and has been widely discussed ever since Joseph Smith studied law hoping to be admitted to the bar. What has…
While Gene Campbell lived through much of the twentieth century (1915-86), the focus of much of his historical research and interest was the nineteenth century. His earlier research and writing on Brig ham Young, Fort…