No Man Knows My History
.jpg)
Cover of the first edition
|
|
| Author | Fawn McKay Brodie |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
|
Publication date
|
1945; revised ed. 1971 |
| Pages | 576 (1971 ed.) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 36510049 |
| 289.3/092 B 20 | |
| LC Class | BX8695.S6 B7 1995 |
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith is a 1945 book by Fawn McKay Brodie, the first important non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Latter Day Saint movement. The book has not gone out of print, and 60 years after its first publication, its publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, continues to sell about a thousand copies annually. A revised edition appeared in 1971, and on the 50th anniversary of its first publication, Utah State University issued a volume of retrospective essays about the book, its author, and her methods.
Reared in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, Mormon family, 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.
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. Brodie finally completed her biography of Smith in 1944, and it was published the following year by Knopf, when the author was thirty.
During her research, Brodie discovered primary sources that had previously been overlooked or neglected. She presented 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 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."
...
Wikipedia