Ever since Mormonism’s founding prophet declared that “No man knows my history/’ writers have been left to imagine it and all its consequences. In short, the Mormon experience is the stuff of literature. Contemporary Mormon…
Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
A study done to see how many polygamous wives there were at the peak of polygamy in the church.
It’s the simplicity I like, no pulpit thunder,
no fiery “Thou shalt nots” rattling the soul.
A set prayer, phrases you can roll around
your mouth all week, then string together
A family story provides an image which well expresses Zina Young Card. On the portico over the main entrance to the Lion House, built by her father Brigham Young for his large family, rests the…
Marlon Brando’s such a babe in Guys and Dolls,
it’s an ideal, makes you feel
positively reverent, same as orange blossoms,
the way they delicately ask to seduce
in the
dense Montana heat, the BLM vehicle musty
and smelling of oil, sweat, and age.
For Ernest Leroy Wilkinson, successful Washington, D.C., lawyer and seventh president of Brigham Young University, campaign politics was a game he could never master. From his rowdy youth in Ogden, Utah’s notorious Hell’s Half-Acre district, where blind eyes turned to cock-fighting and bootlegging, he had been fascinated by the nature and use of power. By the time he was fifty, he had secured a string of hard-won national victories as a tenacious and intimidating legalist. But the lure of politics remained the one attraction, despite other professional and personal accomplishments, he could not resist.
From the 1950s to the 1980s Ezra Taft Benson was at the center of a series of political conflicts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1943 he became a member of…
No funeral today, but the town
has business at its cemetery.
Dust leads the procession;
handles of rakes and hoes protrude
Man of her house, her rooms
Are haunted by dreams.
Leavened by cool morning light,
Loft become sanctum, he lolls