| Menu |
Fawn M. Brodie was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1915, and grew up in a Mormon village lying in a high mountain valley. It was here as a child that she first heard the story of Joseph Smith. "Anyone who grows up with a Mormon background cannot escape him," Mrs. Brodie writes. "He is the first cause - the explanation for Mormon country - the reason in fact for one's being born at all. I cannot remember the first time I heard of his visions and his golden plates, and the shocking tale of his murder in Carthage jail. I seem always to have known him."
Mrs. Brodie received a B. A. degree in English literature at the University of Utah, taught for a year at Weber College in Ogden, and then went east to the University of Chicago. There in 1936 she received an M. A. degree, and shortly afterward began the extensive research which has resulted in the present volume.
Her interests in the past have been numerous and varied. She has taught journalism, worked in the University of Chicago library, and been research assistant to the American Committee for International Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. After being awarded an Alfred A. Knopf Fellowship in Biography in 1943, however, she devoted all her time to completing this book, all, that is, which was not taken up with the care of a household and a baby son.
Mrs. Brodie is also the author of two pamphlets on international affairs, one published by the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, and the other by the World Peace Foundation. Her husband is Bernard Brodie, the author of two well-known books on naval history and strategy, and an associate professor in the Institute of International Studies at Yale.
Source: I have a first edition of this book and pasted on the inside cover was this newspaper review. It's old but unfortunately doesn't contain a source.