No Man Knows My History

Background

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.

Perspective on Smith

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."

Reception and influence

The significance and ground-breaking nature of Brodie's work is generally acknowledged within the field of Mormon studies. 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." In 1971, Marvin S. Hill, a LDS historian 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.

In 2005, LDS scholar Richard Bushman published a highly regarded biography of Smith entitled Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling which has frequently been compared to Brodie's work. In his book, Bushman noted that Brodie's "biography was acknowledged by non-Mormon scholars as the premier study of Joseph Smith" and called Brodie "the most eminent of Joseph Smith's unbelieving biographers." Bushman wrote in 2007 that Brodie had "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."

Nevertheless, Brodie's book has been criticized by some scholars, most often for its speculative interpretations of early Mormon history and its presumptions about Smith's internal motivation. In reviewing No Man Knows My History, Vardis Fisher (himself a prolific novelist—and atheist—who remained unconvinced by Brodie’s theory of Smith's motivations) incorrectly speculated that Brodie would “turn novelist in her next book.”

Brodie's theories—laid out in the book—of Smith fathering children through polygamist relationships have been among the catalysts for professional genetic genealogy studies. During the 2000s, researchers at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation used Y-DNA testing to trace the ancestry of descendants of three of the five children whom Brodie suggested, and found that none of the three were fathered by Smith.

Mormon reactions

Although No Man Knows My History questioned many common Mormon beliefs and portrayals of Joseph Smith, the work was not immediately condemned by Mormon institutions, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), even as the book went into a second printing. In 1946, The Improvement Era, an 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." Brodie's most notable Mormon critic, Brigham Young University professor Hugh Nibley, published a scathing 62-page pamphlet entitled No, Ma'am, That's Not History, asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others. Brodie considered Nibley's pamphlet to be "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda" but dismissed it as "a flippant and shallow piece." The LDS Church formally excommunicated Brodie in June 1946 for apostasy, citing the publication of her views "contrary to the beliefs, doctrines, and teachings of the Church."