Given the inflammatory nature of her topic, I wondered if she would have done better to just state the facts and let them speak for themselves. She is the type of biographer who is unafraid to insert her own ideas.

Even Bushman’s biography which came out last year adds little to what she wrote, and she was the better writer (note that Bushman’s book is still in my “currently reading” folder – it is very well-documented and thorough, but it is a bit of a slog).Īt first I was skeptical of the usefulness of her commentary. I’ve read a bit about early LDS church history, and it seems that succeeding biographies have added only details to her impressive work. I was impressed by the wealth of information she had access to back in the 40’s. Where many writings about him are propaganda intended either to promote or crush faith, her agenda was to understand the man. Despite her own religious skepticism, she seemed to have a real affection for Joseph Smith and his people. In fact, I was surprised by how generous Fawn Brodie was with Joseph Smith. This book was not the anti-Mormon expose I thought it might be.

Nevertheless, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career, completed while she was dying of cancer, demonstrated the hazards of psychobiography in the hands of an author who loathed her subject. the work of a mature scholar represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life.' Her psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson became a best-seller and reintroduced Jefferson's slave and purported mistress Sally Hemings to popular consciousness even before advances in DNA testing increased evidence of a sexual liaison. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which aim to incorporate the alleged insights of Freudian psychology.īrodie's controversial depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent 'genius of improvisation' has been described as a 'beautifully written biography. Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS) family, Fawn McKay drifted away from religion during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Fawn McKay Brodie (Septem– January 10, 1981) was a biographer and professor of history at UCLA, best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History, the first prominent non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Fawn brodie joseph smith