No one today knows more about the handwriting, letters, and other documents produced by Joseph Smith, Jr., than Dean C. Jessee. Long a careful student of these primary resources, his comprehensive editing of the Prophet’s writings…
Students of Utah and Mormon historiography ought to be rejoicing at the flowering of literature in that field over recent years. Beginning perhaps in the last decade with Wallace Stegner’s biography of Bernard DeVoto and…
The banquet table was spread,
But I could no longer smell
Satisfaction in the room.
We couldn’t find anyone
in that inner-city maze.
Between thick buildings
My ex-grandmother-in-law is dying upstairs. Her being with me was my ex-husband’s idea. He said I could have the house if she stayed in it. I reminded him that Gran hated me. He said, “She…
I spent many hours in the Sunset Ward chapel in San Francisco when I was growing up. It was a handsome building, unlike any other ever built in the Church. Firmly planted on a hillside…
More than twenty years ago I was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I can’t speak for the Church, but I suspect it is safe to say that neither…
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…