No Man Knows My History
| File:No Man Knows My History.gif Cover, 2nd rev.ed. (1995) | |
| Author | Fawn McKay Brodie |
|---|---|
| Genre | Biography |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | 1945 |
| Publication place | USA |
| Pages | 576 (1993 ed.) |
| ISBN | 978-0679730545 |
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), by Fawn McKay Brodie, was the first important non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Latter Day Saint movement. The book has never gone out of print, and on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication, Utah State University issued a volume of retrospective essays about the book, its author, and her methods.[1]
Overview
Fawn Brodie
Raised in Utah of a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS) family, Fawn McKay Brodie drifted away from religion during her graduate studies in literature at the University of Chicago. Having found temporary employment at the Harper Library, Brodie began researching the origins of Mormonism. Progress toward her eventual goal of writing a full biography of Joseph Smith was slowed by the birth of her first child and by three rapid moves to follow her husband's career, but in 1943, Brodie entered a three-hundred page draft of her book in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf literary fellowship, and in May her application was judged the best of the forty-four entries.[2]
Brodie's research was enlarged and critiqued by other students of Mormonism, most notably Dale L. Morgan (1914-1971), who became a lifelong friend, mentor, and sounding board.[3] Brodie finally completed her biography of Joseph Smith in 1944, and it was published the following year by Knopf when Brodie was only thirty.[4]
Perspective on Joseph Smith
Brodie presents the young Joseph Smith as a good-natured, lazy, extroverted, and unsuccessful treasure seeker, who, in an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, first developed the notion of golden plates and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon. This book, she claims, was based in part on an earlier work, View of the Hebrews, by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith. Brodie asserts that at first Joseph Smith was a deliberate impostor, who at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, became convinced that he was indeed a prophet—though without ever escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon. Jan Shipps, a preeminent non-LDS scholar of Mormonism, who rejects this theory, nevertheless has called No Man Knows My History a "beautifully written biography...the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life."[5]
Reviews
During her research, Brodie discovered primary sources that had previously been overlooked or neglected.[6] Nevertheless, two perceived weaknesses of Brodie's work were her limited patience with religion and religious impulses and her tendency to transform conjectures into indisputable facts. In reviewing No Man Knows My History, Vardis Fisher (himself a prolific novelist—and atheist—who remained unconvinced by Brodie’s theory) incorrectly speculated that Brodie would “turn novelist in her next book.”[7]
At nearly the same moment, Brodie's friend Dale Morgan declared Brodie’s first book the "finest job of scholarship yet done in Mormon history and perhaps the outstanding biography in several years—a book distinguished in the range and originality of its research, the informed and searching objectivity of its viewpoint, the richness and suppleness of its prose, and its narrative power."[8]
Reaction of the LDS church
Although No Man Knows My History was a direct attack on critical Mormon beliefs about Joseph Smith, the LDS Church was slow to condemn the work even as the book went into a second printing.[9] In 1946, The Improvement Era, the official periodical of the Church, claimed that many of the book's citations arose from doubtful sources and that the biography was "of no interest to Latter-day Saints who have correct knowledge of the history of Joseph Smith." The "Church News" section of the Deseret News provided a lengthy critique that acknowledged the biography's "fine literary style" and then denounced it as "a composite of all anti-Mormon books that have gone before."[10] BYU professor and LDS apologist Hugh Nibley challenged Brodie in another booklet, No, Ma'am, That's Not History, asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others.[11]
Influence
In 1971, Marvin S. Hill, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote:
For more than a quarter century Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History has been recognized by most professional American historians as the standard work on the life of Joseph Smith and perhaps the most important single work on early Mormonism. At the same time the work has had tremendous influence upon informed Mormon thinking, as shown by the fact that whole issues of B.Y.U. Studies and Dialogue have been devoted to considering questions on the life of the Mormon prophet raised by Brodie. There is evidence that her book has had strong negative impact on popular Mormon thought as well, since to this day in certain circles in Utah to acknowledge that one has "read Fawn Brodie" is to create doubts as to one's loyalty to the Church.[12]
Although in research and comprehensiveness No Man Knows My History has now been surpassed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)—which is more than twice as long as Brodie and makes use of the considerable scholarship amassed during the intervening years[13]—Brodie's biography, written before she drifted into psychohistory, may still be read for its literary excellence and skeptical view of Mormon origins. Even Bushman (who is a respected historian as well as a practicing Mormon) has written that Brodie "shaped the view of the Prophet for half a century. Nothing we have written has challenged her domination. I had hoped my book would displace hers, but at best it will only be a contender in the ring, whereas before she reigned unchallenged."[14] Sixty years after its first publication, Knopf was still selling a thousand copies of No Man Knows My History every year.[15]
References
- ^ Newell Bringhurst, Reconsidering No Man Knows My History (Utah State University, 1996).
- ^ Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21; Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 80.
- ^ "Despite his own deep fascination with Mormonism's past, Morgan...was not a practicing Latter-day Saint." Bringhurst, 86. Yet Morgan twice critiqued Brodie's manuscript with "alarming frankness" convincing Brodie that what she had already written read too much like an exposé. "In general, Morgan was much more incisive and penetrating in his critique than the Knopf panel had been in awarding Brodie her fellowship. The difference was that Morgan knew Mormon history and the Knopf readers did not." (88) After publication of No Man Knows My History, Morgan (probably unwisely) wrote for Saturday Review of Literature a glowing review of a book in whose production he had played a central role.
- ^ Bringhurst, 96-97.
- ^ Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 165. See also Jan Shipps, "Richard Lyman Bushman, the Story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, and the New Mormon History," Journal of American History, 94 (September 2007).
- ^ New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5.
- ^ New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5.
- ^ Saturday Review of Literature, 28 (November 28, 1945), 7-8.
- ^ "Latter-day Saint spokesmen, official and otherwise, were extremely slow to comment publicly on No Man Knows My History. Various Mormon publications, most prominently the Deseret News, the Salt Lake City-based daily newspaper owned and operated by the Mormon Church, declined to review, or even to acknowledge the book's existence for months after its release." Bringhurst, 107.
- ^ This review was soon reprinted as a pamphlet and missionary tract. Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 110.
- ^ See No, Ma'am, That's Not History and a critique of Nibley's critique. Brodie herself thought the Deseret News pamphlet "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda," but she dismissed the ultimately more popular No, Ma'am, That's Not History as "a flippant and shallow piece." Bringhurst, 111.
- ^ Marvin S. Hill, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Winter 1972)[1]
- ^ “Bushman is both an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and a practicing Mormon, and his exhaustive biography carefully treads a path between reverence and objectivity.” The New Yorker. “This is a remarkable book, wonderfully readable and supported by exhaustive research.” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 10, 2005. "Bushman's use of original sources, such as letters and journals, plus his access to collected papers from Mormon church historians, provide an insightful glimpse into Smith's life and his eclectic family environment. The account is reasonably critical and respectably analytical, and while quotes are short, more than 150 pages of references and notes allow readers to research them in greater context." Leroy Hommerding, Library Journal. Critical comments excerpted from the Barnes & Noble website Bushman's book was published by the same publisher sixty years after Brodie's.
- ^ Richard Lyman Bushman, On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author's Diary (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 102.
- ^ Richard Lyman Bushman, On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author's Diary, 4.