1. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), ix.
2. Studies reported in Time, April 5, 1993, 4647.
3. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). See also Eric Eliason, ed., Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
4. Cited in Spencer W. Kimball, "The Gospel Vision of the Arts," Ensign 7 (July 1977): 3.
5. Orson F. Whitney, "Home Literature," in A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints, edited by Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 300. The complete text may be found online at the Mormon Literature Website at http://humanities.byu.edu/mldb/homelit.htm
6. Boyd K. Packer, "The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord," 1976 Devotional Speeches of the Year (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977), 268; reprinted in Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives (Provo, Utah: BYU Press, 1980), 56.
7. Kimball, "Gospel Vision of the Arts," 5.
8. England, "The Dawning of a Brighter Day: Mormon Literature after 150 Years," Brigham Young University Studies 22 (Spring 1982): 13160, including "Selected Bibliography." Reprinted in expanded form in Thomas G. Alexander and Jessie L. Embry, eds. After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, 97-146, Charles Redd Monographs in Western History, no. 3 (Provo, Utah: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 1983).
9. Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, and Twenty-two Young Mormon Writers (Provo, Utah: Communications Workshop, 1974).
10. Cracroft, "Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature," Sunstone 16 (July 1993): 5157; complete text may be found online at the Mormon Literature Website at http://humanities.byu.edu/mldb/attune.htm; see also his review of Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems in Brigham Young University Studies 30 (Spring 1990): 119, 12123; online at http://humanities.byu.edu/mldb/cracrevh.htm.
11. Packer, "Art and the Spirit," 10, 16.
12. Bruce W. Jorgensen, "To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say." Sunstone 16 (July 1993): 4150 reprinted in Lavina Fielding Anderson and Eugene England, eds. Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1996): 49-68; complete text accessible on the Mormon Literature Website at http://humanities.byu.edu/mldb/totell.htm. Jorgensen's essay is an expanded version of his 1991 presidential address for the Association for Mormon Letters, which responded in part to Cracroft's review of Harvest cited above, and Cracroft's essay, published together with Jorgensen's in Sunstone, is his 1992 AML presidential address, which in good part responds to Jorgensen. See also Gideon Burton's response to both essays, "Should We Ask, 'Is this Mormon Literature?': Towards a Mormon Criticism." The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994): 227-33; Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 32.3 (Fall, 1999): 33-43; complete text accessible on the Mormon Literature Website at http://humanities.byu.edu/mldb/gbask.htm.
13. Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, 5.
14. Karl Keller, "The Example of Flannery O'Connor," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Winter 1974): 62.
15. Quoted in Keller, "The Example of Flannery O'Connor," 68.
16. Quoted in Keller, "The Example of Flannery O'Connor," 68. O'Connor has also seemed to others a good model for Mormon writers: In "Digging the Foundation: Making and Reading Mormon Literature" (Dialogue 9 [Winter 1974]: 50-61), Bruce Jorgensen quotes her citing Aquinas that "art . . . is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made" and proposing that an art work that is "good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God" (56). In a review of Levi Peterson's Night Soil (Weber Studies 8 [Fall 1991]: 99-100), I propose that "in Levi Peterson, Western literature and Mormon literature finally have their Flannery O'Connor" (99).
17. Keller, "The Example of Flannery O'Connor," 71.
18. Keller, "The Example of Flannery O'Connor," 6970.
19. B. H. Roberts's comprehensive theology, The Truth, the Way, and the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, edited by John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994). Also, The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology: The Masterwork of B. H. Roberts, edited by Stan Larson, with an introduction by Sterling M. McMurrin (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1994).
20. Stan Larson, "The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text," Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Winter 1978): 193208.
21. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 27 vols. (Liverpool, England: R James, 1855), 2:9096.
22. See Eugene England, "Great Books or True Religion?: Defining the Mormon Scholar," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Winter 1974): 3649; reprinted in Dialogues with Myself (Midvale, Utah: Orion Books; distributed by Signature Books), 1984), 5776.
23. Cracroft and Lambert, basically formalists, have also been sensitive to historical and ethical approaches, as have Jorgensen and Edward Geary, who were, like them, trained in New Criticism. I have used formalist close analysis and ethical criticism based on the work of Yvor Winters, Robert Scholes, Renι Girard, and Emmanuel Levinas. Jorgensen and I have both used myth criticism, based on the work of Northrop Frye. Recently, Cecilia Konchar Farr has effectively used feminist criticism on Maurine Whipple's work, and she and Philip Snyder presented an illuminating poststructuralist reading of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge and Thoreau's Walden as eco-biography at the Association for Mormon Letters symposium in January 1993 ("From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake: Ecobiography and Engendered Species Acts in Walden and Refuge," in Lavina Fielding Anderson and Eugene England, eds. Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature [Salt Lake City: Signature, 1996]: 197-211). Tom Plummer applied reader response criticism to Refuge in "Is There Refuge in the Text: Narrator and Reader in Terry Tempest Williams's Memoir," presented at the AML symposium in January 1994 (Annual of the Association for Mormon Letters, 1995 [Salt Lake City: AML, 1995]: 237-47).
24. Smith, "King Follett Discourse," 203.
25. For a discussion of the relations between religious thought and postmodern philosophy, see James E. Faulconer, "An Alternative to Traditional Criticism," Proceedings of the Symposia of the Association for Mormon Letters, 197982 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1983), 11124; and James E. Faulconer, "Protestant and Jewish Styles of Criticism: Derrida and His Critics," Literature and Belief 5 (1985): 4566; for my own reflections on these matters, more complete than my comments here, see "The Dawning of a Brighter Day," 13536, and Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1991), 1721, 2079. Hugh Nibley, in "Genesis of the Written Word," Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, Vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS: Provo, Utah, 1992), 45090, presents evidence for a single, divinely-instituted beginning of human language.
26. Douglas Wilson, "Prospects for the Study of the Book of Mormon as a Work of American Literature." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Spring 1968): 2941.
27. The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) sponsors symposia and publishes a newsletter, essays, books, and a journal, many of which greatly help readers see through to the human realities of text, writers, and editor as a better basis for imaginative response to the Book of Mormon. See, for example, John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1985); and Sorenson, "When Lehi's Party Arrived in the Land, Did They Find Others There?" in the first issue of the new journal sponsored by FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 1 (Fall 1992): 134.
28. John W. Welch, "Chiasmas in the Book of Mormon," Brigham Young University Studies 10 (Fall 1969): 6984; reprinted in Noel B. Reynolds, ed., Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, Religious Studies Monograph Series, vol. 7 (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1982), 3352; Bruce W. Jorgensen, "The Dark Way to the Tree: Typological Unity in the Book of Mormon," in Literature of Belief: Sacred Scripture and Religious Experience, ed. Neal E. Lambert, Religious Studies Monograph Series, No. 5 (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1981), 21731; Richard Dilworth Rust, Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book and Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1997). For an example of ethical literary criticism, based on the work of Renι Girard and Northorp Frye, see Eugene England, "A Second Witness for the Logos: The Book of Mormon and Contemporary Literary Criticism," in By Study and Also by Faith: Essays in Honor of Hugh W. Nibley on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, 27 March 1990, ed. John M. Lundquist and Stephen D. Ricks, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990), 2:91125. Some other important and representative literary criticism of the Book of Mormon includes: George S. Tate, "The Typology of the Exodus Pattern in the Book of Mormon," 24562, and Richard Dilworth Rust, "'All Things Which Have Been Given of God . . . Are the Typifying of Him': Typology in the Book of Mormon," 23343, both in The Literature of Belief; Steven P. Sondrup, "The Psalm of Nephi: A Lyric Reading," Brigham Young University Studies 21 (Summer 1981): 35772, and Richard Dilworth Rust, "Liminality in the Book of Mormon," The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994), 2:207-11.
29. James B. Allen, "The Significance of Joseph Smith's 'First Vision' in Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Fall 1966): 2945; Allen, "Eight Contemporary Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision: What Do We Learn from Them?" Improvement Era 73 (April 1970): 413; Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert, "Literary Form and Historical Understanding: Joseph Smith's First Vision," Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 3142; Arthur Henry King, "Joseph Smith as a Writer," in his The Abundance of the Heart (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986), 197205; and Steven C. Walker, "Doctrine and Covenants as Literature," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:427.
30. Dean C. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1984); and Jessee, The Papers of Joseph Smith, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989, 1992). See also Joseph Smith, Jr., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 2d ed. rev., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1971).
31. Stan Larson, "The King Follett Discourses," see n. 19; Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, comps. and eds., The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1980).
32. See The Discourses of Brigham Young, edited by John A. Widtsoe (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1971 printing), and The Essential Brigham Young (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992). The Journal of Discourses provides a remarkably complete record of sermons by Church leaders from 1854 to 1886. For some analysis see Eugene England, "Brigham Young as Orator and Intellectual," in Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986; Salt Lake City: Tabernacle, 1999), 93108.
33. For a general bibliography see Davis Bitton, ed., Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977).
34. Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff's Journal, 1833-1898, Typescript, ed. Scott G. Kenny, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983-85). See also the condensed version, Waiting for World's End: The Diaries of Wilford Woodruff, ed. Susan Staker (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993).
35. Published in Eliza R. Snow, Eliza R. Snow: An Immortal, Selected Writings of Eliza R. Snow (Salt Lake City: Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., Foundation, 1957), 292370. For discussion of this diary's literary merit see Eugene England, "We Need to Liberate Mormon Men!" in Dialogues with Myself, 15759.
36. Eugene England, ed., "George Laub's Nauvoo Journal," BYU Studies 18 (Winter 1978): 151-78.
37. Manuscript in Harold B. Lee Library, Brigahm Young University, Provo, Utah; published in full as "Death Strikes the Handcart Company," in Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, 14350.
38. Manuscript in LDS Church Archives; published in part, with literary analysis, by Eugene England, "Without Purse or Scrip: An 18-Year-Old Missionary in 1853," New Era 5 (July 1975), 2028, which was reprinted as "'The Lord Knew That There Was Such a Person': Joseph Millett's Journal, 1853," in Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel, 1730.
39. Quoted in William Mulder, in his ground-breaking critical essay, "Mormonism and Literature," Western Humanities Review 9 (Winter 195455): 87; reprinted in Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, 20811. At that early date Mulder praised such "unpretentious subliterature" and claimed that "it is as a collective expression that Mormon literature makes its greatest impact rather than in any single work so far by any single artist."
The best collections of letters are Dean C. Jessee, Personal Writings of Joseph Smith; Jessee, ed., Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book in collaboration with the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1974); Elizabeth Wood Kane (not a Mormon), Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona, Utah, Mormons, and the West no. 4 (1874; Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1974); George S. Ellsworth, Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1974); Frederick Stewart Buchanan, ed., A Good Time Coming: Mormon Letters to Scotland (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988); and Constance L. Lieber and John Sillito, eds., Letters from Exile: The Correspondence of Martha Hughes Cannon and Angus M. Cannon, 18861889 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1989).
40. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher has published the best work on Snow's life and poetry and is at work on a biography and a complete edition of the poems. See Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Eliza and Her Sisters (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1991)
41. Eliza R. Snow, Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1856); and Snow, Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political. Also Two Articles in Prose (Salt Lake City: Latter-day Saints' Printing and Publishing Establishment, 1877).
42. Eliza R. Snow, "O My Father," No. 242 Hymns (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1985).
43. Phelps's enduring achievement is suggested by "Gently Raise the Sacred Strain," which begins each Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast, and "Hosanna Anthem" ("The Spirit of God like a Fire Is Burning"), composed for the dedication of the Kirtland temple in 1835 and still sung at all temple dedications. One of Pratt's most powerfully poetic hymns is "Father in Heaven, We Do Believe," with its remarkable metaphor for baptism, "We shall be buried in the stream / In Jesus' blessed name." See Hymns (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1985), nos. 46, 2, 180.
44. For studies of Mormon tracts and other pamphlets see David J. Whittaker, "Early Mormon Pamphleteering" (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1982); David J. Whittaker, "Orson Pratt: Prolific Pamphleteer," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Autumn 1982): 2741; Peter Crawley, "Parley P. Pratt: Father of Mormon Pamphleteering," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Autumn 1982): 1326; and Scrap Book of Mormon Literature, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Ben E. Rich, n.d.), which reprints many of the nineteenth-century pamphlets.
45. "A Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil" (New York Herald, January 1, 1844) was republished in Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, 25965, and in The Essential Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 3140. The Autobiography was first published in 1874 and reprinted many times since, the latest Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985; for a literary analysis of this work, see Robert A. Christmas, "The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Spring 1966): 3343.
46. See Gean Clark, "A Survey of Early Mormon Fiction" (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1935).
47. "What Shall Our Children Read?" Deseret Evening News, 21 April 1869, 2; Elder George Q. Cannon started to publish a "Faith Promoting Series" of books in 1879, the first of which was his own account of My First Mission; the third, in 1881, Wilford Woodruff's Leaves from My Journal; and the fifth, that same year, James A. Little's biography, Jacob Hamblin. These three were republished together by Preston Nibley as Three Mormon Classics (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis, 1944).
48. Journal of Discourses 9:173. See also Stephen Ken Ehat, "How to Condemn Noxious Novels, by Brigham Young," Century 2, vol. 1 (December 1976): 3648; and Matthew Durrant and Neal e. Lambert, "From Foe to Friend: the Mormon Embrace of Fiction," Utah Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 326-39.
49. Orson F. Whitney, "Home Literature." Contributor 9 (June 1888): 297302; reprinted in Cracroft and Lambert, A Believing People, 2037. For a more thorough review of the "home literature" period see Cracroft, "Seeking 'the Good, the Pure, the Elevating': A Short History of Mormon Fiction" (Parts I and II), Ensign 11 (June 1981): 5762; (July 1981): 5661.
50. Spencer also wrote fiction; see The Senator from Utah and Other Tales of the Wasatch (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1895).
51. Roberts's play was based on Corianton: A Nephite Story (1902). See Cracroft, "Seeking 'the Good, the Pure, the Elevating,'" 61.
52. First published in 1898, Anderson's novel was reprinted over forty times, most recently is Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1992.
53. Nephi Anderson, "Purpose in Fiction," Improvement Era 1 (February 1898): 271. Cited in Richard H. Cracroft, "Nephi, Seer of Modern Times: The Home Literature Novels of Nephi Anderson" Brigham Young University Studies 25 (Spring 1985): 315. Anderson's essays seem intended to prepare a church audience to value Added Upon.
54. Cracroft, "Nephi, Seer of Modern Times," 15.
55. In addition to Cracroft's "Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice," see the conclusion to his "Seeking 'the Good, the Pure, the Elevating,'" 61:: "The future of LDS fiction will probably be closely linked with Home Literature, for the LDS writer and the LDS reader share an abiding faith and hope in eternal principle, in the possibility of billions of happy endings. . . . But the message of Mormon fiction, while inevitably moral, as is most fiction, need not be painfully blatant." Cracroft's one example, Nephi Anderson, seems to counter Cracroft's own argument, since it was his admittedly inferior novel of "artless dogma" that remained popular and influenced later "home literature"not his more skillful "dogmatic art" in the later works.
56. Winters, though known as a formalist "New Critic," was adamant that a poem "is a statement in words about a human experience" (11) and must be responsible to rational ethical standards; see Yvor Winters, "The Morality of Poetry" and other essays in In Defense of Reason, 3d ed. (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947). Booth, a Mormon, has been an articulate opponent of some recent trends in criticism, especially its move toward opposing--or simplistically applying--ethical considerations; see Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Booth has also addressed, satirically, the question of too easily applied religious didacticism, in a forum address at Brigham Young University, "Art and the Church: Or 'The Truths of Smoother,'" published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Winter 1980): 925.
57. Keller, "On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Autumn 1969): 1920.
58. Bruce W. Jorgensen, "'Herself Moving Beside Herself, Out There Alone': The Shape of Mormon Belief in Virginia Sorensen's The Evening and the Morning." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Autumn 1980): 4361.
59. Orson Scott Card, "SF and Religion," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Summer 1985): 12.
60. Anderson, Tory C. "Just the Fiction, Ma'am." Wasatch Review International 1, no. 2 (1992): 6: "The more experience I have, the more I understand this heart and soul, myself, and my fellow human beings. I have my own living experience, but good fiction expands that experience tenfold--one hundredfold--and makes it possible to apply any knowledge I have."
61. Edward A. Geary, "Mormondom's Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s." Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 8998; see also his "The Poetics of Provincialism: Mormon Regional Fiction." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Summer 1978): 1524. Bruce Jorgensen first used (but did not expand upon) the phrase in "Digging the Foundation," 58: "Mormon literature may be said to have its lost or half-lost generation, and some who have not expatriated themselves have suffered mistrust and even brutal ostracism."
62. Fisher gained much of his national prominence with work not connected with Mormonism, the Vridar Hunter tetralogy and his twelve Testament of Man novels, but remained to his death in 1968 best known for Children of God; see Joseph M. Flora, "Vardis Fisher and the Mormons." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Autumn 1969): 4855. Whipple published various articles and storeis and a guidebook, This Is the Place: Utah (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945), but never completed her projected trilogy that would continue Joshua up to the present; see Maryruth Bracy and Linda Lambert, eds., "Maurine Whipple's Story of The Giant Joshua," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Autumn/Winter 1971): 55-62; Bruce Jorgensen, "Retrospection: Great Joshua," Sunstone 3 (SeptemberOctober 1978): 68 and the special section of essays on Whipple in The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994. Sorensen received two Guggenheims, but she gained greatest recognition, including the Newbery Medal, for her children's books; see Mary L. Bradford, "Virginia Sorensen: An Introduction," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Fall 1980): 1316; Eugene England, "Virginia Sorensen as the Founding Foremother of the Mormon Personal Essay: My Personal Tribute." Exponent II 17, no. 1 (1992): 1214; and the special section of essays on Sorensen in The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994.
63. Richard H. Cracroft, "'Freshet in the Dearth: Samuel W. Taylor's Heaven Knows Why and Mormon Humor," Sunstone 5 (MayJune 1980): 3137 and Cracroft, "Literature, Mormon Writers of: Novels," Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:839. Two other important novels by Taylor are Family Kingdom (New York: McGraw, 1951) and Nightfall at Nauvoo (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
64. Bruce W. Jorgensen, "A 'Smaller Canvas' of the Mormon Short Story since 1950," Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1983 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1984), 1031; see also Jorgensen, "Literature, Mormon Writers of: Short Stories," Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:84244.
65. For a discussion of the book's many problems because of Brodie's bias, see Marvin S. Hill, "Secular or Sectarian History? A Critique of No Man Knows My History," Church History 43 (March 1974): 7896 and his review of the second edition, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 7 (Winter 1972): 7285. Newell G. Bringhurst's "Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brodie--Sisters in Mormon Dissent," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27 (Summer 1994): 105-27, explores the similarities, differences, and relationship between these two writers.
66. For the best early essay on the problems and possibilities of Mormon historiography, see Richard L. Bushman, "Faithful History," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Winter 1969): 1125, which, in an inversion of a Mormon epigram, suggests the possibility, relevant to authors of literature as well as history, that the writer's success may be related to character: "[We gain] knowledge no faster than [we are] saved" (25). Recent collections of Mormon historiography (and some criticisms of it) of the past twenty-five years are George D. Smith, ed., Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992); and D. Michael Quinn, ed., The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992).
67. Levi S. Peterson, "Juanita Brooks: The Mormon Historian as Tragedian." Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976): 4754, and his Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988). Brooks has also written an excellent autobiography, Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1982) and edited her husband's autobiography, Uncle Will Tells His Story (Salt Lake City: Taggart, 1970).
68. Cracroft, "Nephi, Seer of Modern Times," 14.
69. Geary, "The Poetics of Provincialism," 24.
70. Cracroft uses the term "faithful realism" to describe the recent group of Mormon novelists he most admires in his Encyclopedia of Mormonism essay (2:839). With his permission, I adopt it here for the entire fourth period of Mormon literature I am attempting to define.
71. Karl Keller, "A Pilgrimage of Awe," review of Clinton F. Larson's The Lord of Experience. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Spring 1968): 112; Thomas Schwartz, in "Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larson," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Autumn 1974): 39-48, claims that Larson's focus on unredemptive violence in both his plays and poetry makes his work not Mormon at all; in my judgment Larson profoundly expresses a tragic sense of pain and loss in the face of the violence inevitable in a universe of law and agency, a vision fully consonant with Mormon theology. Other important Larson collections of poetry are Counterpoint: A Book of Poems (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973) and The Western World (Provo, Utah: Research Division Brigham Young University, 1978).
72. Carol Lynn Pearson, Beginnings (Provo, Utah: Trilogy Arts, 1967), The Search (Provo, Utah: Trilogy Arts, 1970), etc., and most recently, Women I Have Known and Been (Murray, Utah: Aspen Books, 1992); Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage (Salt Lake City: Parliament Publishers, 1971) and many other volumes, the latest being Things Happen: Poems of Survival (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1991); John B. Harris, Barbed Wire (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1974); Edward L. Hart, To Utah (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1979); and Marden J. Clark, Moods: Of Late (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1979). See Eugene England and Dennis Clark, eds. Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), "Notes on Poets," for more complete bibliographies of these poets, all of whom have continued publishing. A remarkable and singular achievement was R. Paul Cracroft's long Mormon epic poem, A Certain Testimony (Salt Lake City: Epic West, 1979).
73. See the editors' commentaries in Harvest, and, for a contrary view, the review by Richard Cracroft (Note 10). Linda Sillitoe has published in Dialogue and Exponent II and has a recent first collection, Crazy for Living (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993); Susan Howe has published in the New Yorker and Sewanee Review; Lance Larsen has published in the New Republic and Hudson Review and has recently published a collection, Erasable Walls (Michigan: Western Michigan University, New Issues Press, 1998); Kathy Evans has published in the Southern Review and California Quarterly and has a first collection, Imagination Comes to Breakfast (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992); Lisa Orme Bickmore has a new collection Haste (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994).
74. For the best review of these writers, such as Ray B. West, Jr., Wayne Carver, and David Wright (who doesn't quite fit the expatriate label but was "lost" to the Mormon literary community by his isolation and early death), see Jorgensen, "A 'Smaller Canvas,'" 1031 and its excellent bibliography; also see Jorgensen's "The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Summer 1978): 3852.
75. John Bennion, Breeding Leah and Other Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990). A story like "Dust," in this collection, is both characteristically Mormon in its protagonist's guilt-ridden response to the apocalyptic implications of his work on nerve gases and avant garde in its use of stylistic disjunctions Bennion learned from his teacher Donald Barthelme. Other avant garde Mormon writers include the postmodernist, occasionally minimalist, Darrell Spencer, who is publishing widely in prestigious magazines like Epoch and has two collections, Woman Packing a Pistol (Port Townsend, Wash.: Dragon Gate, 1987) and Our Secret's Out (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), and Brian Evenson, who has appeared in The Quarterly and Nomad and has also published a collection of short stories, Altman's Tongue (New York: Knopf, 1994).
76. Author's notes from a lecture by Bennion at Brigham Young University, September 1991. Thayer's very influential first collection was Under the Cottonwoods and other Mormon Stories (Provo, Utah: Frankson Books, 1977; most recently republished Salt Lake City, Utah: Tabernacle Books, 1999).
77. See Bruce W. Jorgensen, "Romantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer," Western American Literature 22 (Spring 1987): 4347, and Eugene England, "Thayer's Ode to a Redtail Hawk," Mormon Letters Annual, 1983 (Salt Lake City: Association for Mormon Letters, 1984), 4253; revised as "Douglas Thayer's Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone: A Mormon's Christian Response to Wilderness," BYU Studies 34, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 52-72. In my judgment, Thayer's "The Redtail Hawk," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Autumn 1969): 8394, reprinted in Mr. Wahlquist, is the finest Mormon story yet. Its sophisticated use of point of view and its profound theme enable it to stand with the best American stories of the twentieth century.
78. See Eugene England, "Wilderness as Salvation in Peterson's The Canyons of Grace," Western American Literature 19 (Spring 1984): 1728; my review of Night Soil, Weber Studies 8 Fall 1991): 99100; and my "Beyond 'Jack Fiction': Recent Achievement in the Mormon Novel," BYU Studies 28 (Spring 1988): 97-109.
79. See Eugene England's column in This People 11 (Fall 1990): 65-68 for a review of many current "home literature" writers and Richard Cracroft's review of Gerald Lund's The Work and the Glory, Vol. 1, in BYU Studies 31 (Summer 1991): 7781. For authors publishing nationally, see Laura Kalpakian, Those Later Days (New York: Times Books, 1985); Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm (New York: Norton, 1989); and Walter Kirn, My Hard Bargain (New York: Knopf, 1990).
80. See Eugene England, "The New Mormon Fiction" and also the notes on contributors and the list of "Other Notable Mormon Stories and Collections" in Eugene England, ed., Bright Angels and Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), xi-xx, 333-48. My column for the Summer 1990 issue of This People 11, no. 2, pp. 63-65, describes the annus mirabilis of 198990, when nearly as much first-rate Mormon fiction was published as in the previous ten years, or the 150 years before that.
81. Sillitoe has a novel, Sideways to the Sun (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987) and a collection of stories, Windows on the Sea and Other Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989); Fillerup has a collection, Visions and Other Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), and a novel, The River (Signature Books, forthcoming).
82. Horne, who lives in Canada, publishes both poetry and prize-winning stories in a great variety of non-Mormon publications and now has a collection, What Do Ducks Do in Winter? (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993); Chandler, who lives in Ohio, has a collection of short stories, Benediction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989) and has also published a play, Appeal to a Lower Court, Sunstone 14 (December 1990): 2750
83. Barber has a collection, The School of Love (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990) and a novel, And the Desert Shall Blossom: A Novel (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); Young has two novels, House without Walls (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990) and Salvador (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1992), and a collection, Elegies and Love Songs (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1992). Her pioneering work treating African American Latter-day Saints includes I Am Jane, a play about Jane Manning James, which won the Association for Mormon Letters Award in Drama for 2000, and Standing on the Promises, a trilogy of historical fiction co-written with Darius Gray, of which the first, One More River to Cross has so far appeared (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000).
84. For the critical writing about Card through 1990, both by Mormons and others, see Collings's bibliography. See also Eugene England "Speaker for the Dead and the Different," This People 14 (Summer 1993): 4150; England, "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Orson Scott Card"; and Mick McAllister, "Embracing the Other: The Beloved Alien and Other Ethical Fictions of Orson Scott Card," The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 2:158-65. Card forthrightly expresses some of his views on the values and moral quality of literature in A Storyteller in Zion: Essays and Speeches (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1993), 65105, which also includes his important letter to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Summer 1985) on "Science Fiction and the Mormon Religion," 15661.
85. Orson Scott Card, "Foreword," in Kathryn H. Kidd, Paradise Vue (Greensboro, N.C.: Hatrack River Publications, 1989), xxi, xiii. Card seems to me too harsh in his judgments of previous novels and too impressed with the writers he is sponsoring, ("I am tempted to say that now . . . the Mormon people have their Jane Austen, their Mark Twain" [xiv]). He certainly seems right about his goals, but so far he is fulfilling them best through his own writing.
86. The sermon tradition has been powerful and influential from the first, beginning with Joseph Smith (See Ehat and Cook, Word of Joseph Smith) and continuing through Brigham Young (The Discourses of Brigham Young, ed. John A. Widtsoe) and the other pioneer orators collected in the Journal of Discourses. The sermons of modern church leaders whose sermon style has been influential, notably J. Reuben Clark, David O. McKay, Hugh B. Brown, Spencer W. Kimball, Gordon B. Hinckley, Neal A. Maxwell (AML prize, 1984), Marion D. Hanks, Jeffrey R. Holland, and Chieko N. Okazaki (AML prize, 1993) are available in the semi-annual Conference Reports and, since 1972, in the May and November issues of the Ensign. For an analysis of Mormon sermon style and its literary power, see my "A Small and Piercing Voice: The Sermons of Spencer W. Kimball," Brigham Young University Studies 25 (Fall 1985): 7790, reprinted in Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel, 12543 and Gideon Burton, "Twentieth-Century Mormon Eloquence: A Stylistic Analysis of Two Sermons by Neal A. Maxwell." Though there are as yet no collections of sermons by lay Mormons, many such sermons have been published in official and independent periodicals, particularly in the "From the Pulpit" section of Dialogue, and many of the best modern personal essays are reworked sermons, showing the close connection between these two forms.
87. William A. Wilson, a distinguished American folklorist, has written persuasively about the power and value of Mormon folk literature in On Being Human: The Folklore of Mormon Missionaries (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1981); "The Study of Mormon Folklore: An Uncertain Mirror for Truth." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 22 (Winter 1989): 95110; "In Praise of Ourselves: Stories to Tell," Brigham Young University Studies 30 (Winter 1990): 524; ; See his "Mormon Folklore" in David J. Whittaker, ed., Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the United States. (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1995): 437-54, for examples and resources for Mormon folklore, such as the work of Austin E. and Alta S. Fife and Thomas E. Cheney and the Mormon Folklore Archives at Brigham Young University and Utah State University. The special issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly on "Mormon Foklore" (Fall 1976) contains another foundational essay by Wilson: "A Bibliography of Studies in Mormon Folklore," Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (Fall 1976): 38994.
88. See, for instance, Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/FARMS, 1989); Dennis Rasmussen, The Lord's Question: A Call to Come unto Him (Provo, Utah: Keter Foundation, 1985); Neal A. Maxwell, That Ye May Believe (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1992); Jeffrey R. and Patricia Holland, On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989); and Chieko N. Okazaki, Lighten Up! (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992) and Cat's Cradle (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993).
89. In their section on "The Essay" in A Believing People, Cracroft and Lambert included six essays that might be called informal, but only one, Geary's "Goodbye to Poplarhaven," that has the literary and personally revealing qualities that mark the excellent work being done since in this important form of the fourth period. In their introduction to that section, the editors express surprise that "the essay has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected" (201) and predict that "the personal essay will undoubtedly assume a larger role as a vehicle for the expression of the values of a people as manifest in the individual life of a sensitive writer" (202); and indeed Geary's essay began the outpouring of work that has fulfilled that prediction. (There were a few excellent single essays before Geary's, such as Karl Keller's "Every Soul Has Its South," Dialogue 1 [Summer 1966]: 7279, and Carole C. Hansen's "The Death of a Son," Dialogue 2 [Autumn 1967]: 9196, but they did not become part of a continuing body of influential work.) Geary in turn was influenced by Virginia Sorensen's collection, Where Nothing is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963), and named his own collection Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985). He uses a phrase for the Mormon country skyline from Sorensen's collection (in "The Ghost") for the title of his most recent work, an experimental combination of personal reflection with natural and cultural history, The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992).
90. The earliest collections still tended to emphasize the somewhat scholarly and formal, such as Claudia L. Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (Cambridge: Emmeline Press, 1976) and Vicky Burgess-Olson, ed., Sister Saints (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), but gradually the truly personal essay emerged in collections like Lowell L. Bennion's The Things that Matter Most (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1978); Eugene England's Dialogues with Myself; Sharon Hawkinson's Only Strangers Travel (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984); Edward Geary's Goodbye to Poplarhaven; and Mary Lythgoe Bradford's Leaving Home: Personal Essays (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987). Bradford also edited two notable collections: Mormon Women Speak: A Collection of Essays (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Co., 1982) and Personal Voices: A Celebration of Dialogue (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987).
91. See especially Bradford, "I, Eye, Aye: A Personal Essay on Personal Essays." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Summer 1978): 8189; Clifton Holt Jolley, "Mormons and the Beast: In Defense of the Personal Essay," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Autumn 1978): 13739; Donlu Dewitt Thayer, "Literature, Mormon Writers of: Personal Essays," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:84041; England, "The Dawning of a Brighter Day," 15254; and England, "Virginia Sorensen as the Founding Foremother," 1214. For a general introduction to the contemporary personal essay, see The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present selected and with a fine historical and theoretical introduction by Phillip Lopate (New York: Avelar Books, Doubleday, 1994).
92. Kevin G. Barnhurst published directly Mormon personal essays, "Living without Health," Commentary 75 (April 1983): 3340, and "The Lumpen Middle Class," American Scholar 51 (Summer 1982): 36979; Terry Tempest Williams published "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," which became the last chapter of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), in Northern Lights 6 (January 1990): 911, and in MS 2 (September/October 1991): 3134. See also Eugene England "Easter Weekend," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21 (Spring 1988): 1930 and England, "My Grandfather's Nickel," forthcoming in Sewanee Review. Illustrating the shifting border between fiction and personal essay is the work of Pauline Mortensen, written as personal essays for her master's thesis at Brigham Young University but published as stories in various periodicals, and her collection, Back Before the World Turned Nasty (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989).
93. Elouise Bell has published humorous personal essays regularly in Network, a magazine for professional women, collected in Only When I Laugh (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990). Laurel Ulrich, who has published her personal essays regularly in Exponent II, which she helped found in 1974, as well as in the Ensign, and Dialogue, is working on two collections: Mormon personal essays, to be published by the Women's Research Center at Brigham Young University, and more general essays, to be published by Knopf, the publishers of her 1990 Pulitzer Prize winning A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 17851812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). Thomas Edward Cheney has published a fine collection of folkloristic and boyhood memories shaped into essays, Voices from the Bottom of the Bowl: A Folk History of Teton Valley, Idaho, 18231952 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991).
94. See the list of these and a fine short history of Mormon drama in Robert A. Nelson's entry on "Literature, Mormon Writers of: Drama," Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:83738.
95. Fires of the Mind was published in Sunstone 1 (Winter 1975): 2393, and produced at BYU in 1974 and again in 1982, Robert A. Nelson directing. Huebener was produced at Brigham Young University in 1976, Ivan Crosland directing, and is published in Rogers's collections, God's Fools: Plays of Mitigated Conscience (N.p.: Eden Books, 1983; distributed by Signature Books) and Huebener and Other Plays (Provo, Utah: Poor Robert's Publishers, 1992). Frederick Bliss and P. Q. Gump (aliases for Orson Scott Card) published an early piece of useful dramatic criticism, "Mormon Shakespears [sic]: A Study of Contemporary Mormon Theatre," Sunstone 1 (Spring 1976): 5563. Recent work suggests a growing interest in Mormon dramatic criticism: see Nola D. Smith, "Madwomen in the Mormon Attic: A Feminist Reading of Saturday's Warrior and Reunion" in The Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 1:139-44, and Michael Evendon, "Angels in a Mormon Gaze," Sunstone 17 (September 1994): 55-64.
96. More recently Arrington has written J. Golden and, with Tim Slover, Wilford Woodruff: God's Fisherman, produced at Oxford, England, in 1987 and published in Sunstone 16 (February 1992): 2848. This tradition has been further developed by Carol Lynn Pearson in Mother Wove the Morning, her recreation of sixteen women from history exploring the concept of a Mother God, which since 1990 has played regularly to audiences in Utah and throughout the country and is on video.
97. Burdens of Earth was produced at Brigham Young University in 1987, directed by Robert A. Nelson, and published in Sunstone 11 (November 1987): 1233; Katy was commissioned for the 1992 Brigham Young University Women's Conference and directed by Claudia Harris.
98. Dreambuilder was produced at Brigham Young University in 1989, directed by John Elzen, and Scales was produced at Weber State University in 1981, directed by Tim Sutton.
99. In the Company of Men was produced at Brigham Young University in 1992, directed by the author, and won the Association for Mormon Letters prize for 1993. Sanguinarians was produced at Brigham Young University and in Chicago in 1990.
100. Produced at Brigham Young University in May 1993, directed by Thomas Rogers, and published in Sunstone 17 (June 1994): 30-53.
101. In addition to the official Church periodicals, all of which continue to publish short stories (except for the Ensign), personal essays, and poetry, and the well-established unofficial journals such as BYU Studies, Dialogue, Exponent II, and Sunstone, which publish more contemporary and even experimental examples of these same forms (and, in the case of Sunstone, occasional dramas), new periodicals are constantly appearing, such as This People and Zarahemla: A Forum for Mormon Poetry. The most recent is Wasatch Review International, founded 1992, which is devoted entirely to publishing the best current literature and criticism [web editor's note: WRI was no longer publishing as of 1998].
Deseret Book and Bookcraft continue to publish mainly didactic "home literature," though they have reached for new levels of faithful realism in writers like Carroll Hoefling Morris, whose The Broken Covenant (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985) takes on the difficult topic of adultery, and Gerald Lund, who won the Association for Mormon Letters Awards in 1991 and 1993 for volumes one and four of his epic The Work and the Glory (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1990). Signature Books is the main publisher of the writers of the fourth period, though some have been published recently by the University of Utah Press and an increasing number by national publishers. Aspen Books is doing an increasing number of books by Mormon writers of all kinds, including an anthology, Christmas for the World (1991), Margaret Blair Young's fine novel, Salvador; and a forthcoming biography of Maurine Whipple by Veda Tebbs Hale and a collection of Whipple's fiction, including unfinished drafts of a sequel to The Giant Joshua. Tabernacle Books has published one LDS children's book (Rulon T. Burton and Charlotte Mortimer, The Island that Was Not There [Salt Lake City: Tabernacle Books, 1998]) and has begun a series of reprint and original works of Mormon literature, Mormon Literary Library, in 1999, whose first three volumes include Douglas H. Thayer's Under the Cottonwoods, Eugene England's Why the Church is as True as the Gospel, and Donald R. Marshall's The Rummage Sale.
102. The proceedings of this professional association, containing many of the best essays in Mormon literary criticism, have appeared in seven volumes, and its regular quarterly Newsletter includes short reviews of most new books of Mormon literature. It also encourages Mormon writers by sponsoring regular readings of new work in members' homes and through its annual awards in the novel, short fiction, poetry, personal essay, and criticism. The Association also awards honorary life memberships, with a handsome plaque, to distinguished contributors to Mormon letters.
103. See Richard H. Cracroft's regular (beginning March 1991) column, "Alumni Book Nook," in Brigham Young Magazine for all Brigham Young University Alumni (formerly BYU Today), and my "Worth Reading," which appears regularly (since 1988) in This People.
104. See her very popular Victorian mystery series, which features the morally reflective Inspector Thomas Pitt and his remarkably liberated wife and co-crimesolver, Charlotte. Bethlehem Road (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990) deals in part with the starving to death of a Mormon convert by her abusive, chauvinist husband, who thinks he has the right to refuse a mere woman's decision about religion. The fantasy series begins with Tathea (Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 1999).
105. The pain this dilemma creates for many Mormon writers was expressed recently by one, who said to me, "I believe God has given me an artistic gift with which to bless the Church and the world, and I have devoted my life to developing and sharing that gift. But the official Church magazines have made it clear they do not need or want my gift to fulfill their didactic purposes, the non-Mormon journals and presses reject my efforts to express my faith through my writing as too religious' for their audience, and when I write for the independent Mormon periodicals and presses I am considered, by many Mormons, persona non grata." [Editor's note: Eugene England has more fully discussed his concerns over current Mormon publishing in "Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left!: The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 32.3 (Fall, 1999): 13-32.]
106. Journal of Discourses 7:237. Elsewhere Brigham Young insisted humans must "learn the nature of mankind, and to discern that divinity inherent in them. . . . We should not only study good, and its effects upon our race, but also evil, and its consequences" (cited in Cracroft, "Seeking 'the Good,'" pt. I, 58).
107. Smith, History of the Church, 3:295.
108. Packer, "The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord," 281. I feel particularly good about the prospects of Mormon literature because I have recently read, in manuscript, Douglas Thayer's new novel, "A Member of the Church." It is a splendidly skilled and moving exploration of two different kinds of moral and spiritual life in young Mormon men-one that, I believe, fulfills Elder Packer's promise.