Richard Cracroft

RICHARD CRACROFT, Nan Osmond Grass Professor in English at Brigham Young University, is one of the most important and active critics of Mormon literature. With Neal Lambert he has edited two anthologies of Mormon Literature, A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1974; online at http://humanities.byu.edu/MLDB/abp-toc.htm) and 22 Young Mormon Writers (Provo, Utah: Communications Workshop, 1975). Cracroft continues to write numerous reviews of Mormon literature in a regular column in BYU Magazine and in other venues of Mormon criticism. A past president of the Association for Mormon Letters, he teaches Literature of the Latter-day Saints at Brigham Young University, where he currently serves as the director of the Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature.

The Schroeder Mormon Collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Library

Articles/Essays – Volume 02, No. 3

Shortly before the turn of this century, a young criminal lawyer practicing in Salt Lake City, published on the back of one of his own pamphlets the following advertisement: “I want all books on the…

A New Look at Repentance: The Miracle of Forgiveness

Articles/Essays – Volume 05, No. 3

In The Miracle of Forgiveness, Elder Spencer W. Kimball, acting president of the Council of Twelve, has written an often moving, spiritually refreshing, and highly readable book. In attempting this book-length examination of the principle…

Fiddlin’ Around in Orderville, or, A Mormon on the Roof | Carol Lynn Pearson, The Order is Love

Articles/Essays – Volume 06, No. 2

Carol Lynn Pearson, in her delightful musical, The Order is Love, has managed to put her finger on the pulse of Mormon history and discover a vigorous throb of universality which is at times sobering…

The Discomforter: Some Personal Memories of Joseph Fielding Smith

Articles/Essays – Volume 07, No. 1

I was about twelve when I first met President and Sister Smith. They had come to visit the Thirty-Third Ward, Bonneville Stake, and the family of my pal, Doug Myers, my bishop’s son and President…

On the Way to Obsession | Claire Noall, Surely the Night

Articles/Essays – Volume 08, No. 2

Here is yet another novel about the sensitive and soul-torn nineteenth century Mormon woman, another proclamation that if it took men to match our mountains, it was only because both had been long overmatched by…

“A Profound Sense of Community”: Mormon Values in Wallace Stegner’s Recapitulation

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 1

In his carefully crafted and distinguished novel Recapitulation (1979), Wallace Stegner, Iowa-born, Saskatchewan-reared, but Utah-formed, joins his protagonist Bruce Mason on a brief visit to Salt Lake City some forty-five years after leaving home. The seventy-ish Mason, now a successful lawyer, distinguished internationalist and former ambassador, returns to the city of his youth and young manhood to arrange for the burial of his Aunt Margaret. To his surprise, his Gentile return to Zion releases—through an outpouring of nostalgia, memories, dreams and fantasies—the ghosts of unresolved conflicts which have haunted him, consciously and subconsciously, from those early years.

Anne Perry’s Tathea: A Preliminary Consideration: Tathea by Anne Perry

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 3