Fawn M. Brodie | |
|---|---|
![Brodie in 1966[1]](view_image.php?q=Fawn_M._Brodie&sq=Aston Villa &lang=en&file=File:Fawn_McKay_Brodie.png) Brodie in 1966[1] | |
| Born | Fawn McKay September 15, 1915 Ogden, Utah, U.S. |
| Died | January 10, 1981 (aged 65) Santa Monica, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Biographer and history professor |
| Alma mater | |
| Subject | Psychobiography |
| Notable works |
|
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
| Parent | Thomas E. McKay |
| Relatives |
|
Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915 – January 10, 1981) was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History (1945), an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.[2]
Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married Bernard Brodie, an academic who became a national defense expert; they had three children. 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 incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.
Brodie's depiction of Smith in 1945 as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation"[3] has been described as both 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"[4] and as a work that presented conjecture as fact.[5] Her best-selling psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1974, was the first modern examination of evidence that Jefferson had taken his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine and fathered children by her. Brodie concluded he had done so, a conclusion supported by a 1998 DNA analysis and current scholarly consensus.
- ^ Bringhurst, Newell G. (Winter 1989). "Applause, Attack, Ambivalence—Varied Responses to Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History". Utah Historical Quarterly. 57 (1): 46–65. doi:10.2307/45061736. JSTOR 45061736. S2CID 254431839 – via Issuu.
- ^ This article usually uses the terms "Mormon" and "Mormonism" to describe the entire movement that originated after the publication of the Book of Mormon and Latter-day Saint and LDS to refer to the largest of the Latter day Saint sects, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City.
- ^ Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd. ed., 1971), 403.
- ^ Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 165. However, the Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley claimed he was immediately struck "by the brazen inconsistencies that swarm in its pages". No, Ma'am, That's Not History (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1960), 5.
- ^ The New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5.
© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search