Samuel W. Taylor

You Can’t Tell a Book by It’s Cover

How to Read a Mormon Scholar

Notes and Comments

The Little Man Who Isn’t There

Mormons might find particular interest in the recent defeat by the California legislature of a bill that would have repealed all laws against sexual relationships by consenting adults. Only an impassioned stand by a coterie of legislators from that strong hold of rectitude commonly known as Rafferty Country prevented its passage, as members of this group with Bibles opened thundered denunciation of the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah. Proponents of the defeated bill remained confident, however, of its eventual passage in future sessions, and predicted that similar legislation will within a few years prevail throughout most of the nation. 

Peculiar People, Positive Thinkers, and the Prospect of Mormon Literature

As a Mormon writer, I have long been concerned that most of the books and magazine articles published nationally about the Mormons are written by Jews and Gentiles rather than my own people. In show…

A Mirror for Mormon’s | Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints

A superlative is an automatic challenge, and when Mrs. Brodie calls City of the Saints “the best book on the Mormons published during the nineteenth century,” my impulse is to disprove it. At surface glance…

Little Did She Realize: Writing for the Mormon Market

So you want to write a Mormon novel? Great! Here’s a story for you:—

It’s about a Mormon bishop and his family, see, so you can get in all the little inside details about the L.D.S. people. The bishop’s wife is an extremely devoted mother of three children, two lovely daughters and a son who is a genius. The mother is so excessively devoted to her genius son that she drives him into a madhouse. But before he is locked up he has an incestuous affair with a sister which ruins her life, he causes his best friend’s suicide and drives his other sister into an unhappy marriage with a Gentile. His own disintegration causes his father, the bishop, to die of a broken heart.

How To Read a Mormon Scholar

My Father’s Six Widows

In view of the fact that my father had sacrificed both worldly goods and his chances in heaven for the dream of the great patriarchal family, it is ironical that the only time all six…

The Ultimate Disgrace

After writing Family Kingdom, which was the story of my father and the great family of six wives and three dozen kids, I made a special effort to become acquainted with those of my brothers…

Out of Limbo

Particularly since he had been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, loss of church membership was shattering to my father’s professional, social and business affairs. One day John W. Taylor was revered as…

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Judah Among the Ephriamites | Juanita Brooks, History of the Jews in Utah and Idaho

This might well be the most difficult book Juanita Brooks ever undertook. Consider the formidable problems: Though Mrs. Brooks is the scholar’s scholar of Mormonism, what can she do about the fact that the Jews…

Nightfall at Far West | Ruth Louise Partridge, Other Drums

As first written, this was an “I’ve got a secret” manuscript, of the type which causes my blood pressure to rise alarmingly. The secret was that while it was a novel about Edward Partridge, first…

The Closet Bluebird

Reed Smoot had become a U. S. Senator, and the “Y” a university, when I began kindergarten at Brigham Young Academy, with Ida Dusenberry as my teacher. Ida Smoot Dusenberry was a younger sister of…

The Animal Kingdom | Peter Bart, Thy Kingdom Come

As every author knows, the blurb on the dust cover of a book is of vital importance, because many reviewers read nothing else. I found the blurb of Thy Kingdom Come invaluable after reading every…

If I Were Satan

If I were Satan, I’d keep a scrapbook, a book of remembrance, if you will, of the hidden face of evil. It would contain such eternal verities as this by English philosopher and mathematician William…

How I Destroyed the Old Salt Lake Theatre

Yep, it was me who done it. Me and the kid with the telescope. We were the cause of the historic theatre’s demolition. Let me tell you how it happened.  I was living in Salt…

The Ordeal of Lowry Nelson and the Mis-spoken Word

The Golden Dream and the Nightmare: The Closet Crusade of A.C. Lambert