Summer 1978
The Summer 1978 Issue offers an in-depth examination of Mormon literature, history, and thought. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher introduces the collection, with Edward A. Geary exploring regional themes in Mormon fiction. George S. Tate discusses Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s connection to Mormon themes. Bruce W. Jorgensen analyzes the life and work of artist David Wright, while Franklin Fisher provides commentary on three essays, and Herbert Marker reflects in Excavating Myself. Neal Lambert and Steven P. Sondrup examine 19th-century Mormon autobiographies, focusing on how reality and literary qualities are represented. Mary L. Bradford explores personal essays, and Candadai Seshachari shares an outsider’s insights. Also included are works by guest artist Marilyn R. Miller, poetry by Steven Goldsberry, a survey of current literature by Stephen W. Stathis, and contributions by Hugh W. Nibley and others on intellectual and cultural themes within Mormonism.
Bob Rees called it a “summit meeting of the Mormon literati,” the group which gathered April 20, 1976, in the conference room of the Church’s Historical Department. Actually it was just a group of people…
The Latter-day Saints have been a source of sensationalistic subject matter for popular novelists almost since the beginning of the Church. But the Mormon novel as a treatment of Mormon materials from a Mormon point…
When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…
[1]David L. Wright did not begin to exist for me until more than a year after his death—in 1968 when I saw his play, Still the Mountain Wind. For other portions of the Mormon audience,…
Mormons are perhaps not as interesting to other people as they think they are. True, we have our history of strange practices and our epic migration to recommend us to the wider community, but the…
Somewhere a book is waiting to be written—somewhere, deepburied in the Mormon unconscious, and all we Mormon writers are hard at work digging up the back yards of our past trying to find it. It…
Some have suggested that the most successful writing about the Mormon experience in the nineteenth-century comes from the frail and fading pages of the personal accounts recorded by first generation Mormons. From the first it…
Among Mormons, autobiography has been for decades one of the most widespread modes of literary expression and can be related to the larger tradition of the genre in terms of the nineteenth-century origin of the…
In A Believing People, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert lament that the essay “has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected.” Early Mormons, they note, kept forceful diaries, wrote…
At the second annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, as at the first, two literary concerns seemed to have emerged. Not so surprisingly, at the bottom of both these issues was the question…
In one of his fascinating scientific survey books, this time dealing with the latest discoveries about the brain, Nigel Calder notes, “Two of the most self-evident characteristics of the conscious mind are that 1) the mind attends to one thing at a time, and 2) that at least once a day the conscious mind is switched off.”
It might never happen, I say.
The wind might rise
on the lake and then every
image would be broken,
scattered into itself.
The ridge is crusted with blue snow.
Evening descends, learning its way
to the river, the slow deep core of winter.
“Of making of books there is no end.” These words from Ecclesiastes could as well be applied to the more than thirty thousand doctoral dissertations and an even larger number of master’s theses completed in…
Mormons have always had a passion for recording the experiences that shaped their lives—their dreams, ideals, intentions and conceptions of themselves. The sheer volume of their diaries, journals and other records stagger the imagination. Nothing…
This excellent, provocative study breaks new ground in probing the history of the Intermountain West. It had its inception when Professor Alexander noticed the widespread dissatisfaction of the residents of the far western Territories with…
J. Kenneth Davies, a long-time student of Utah labor history, has been interested in the relationship between the labor movement in Utah and the Mormon Church. Deseret’s Sons of Toil is intended to be a…
Writing a book of short stories/sketches about a group of missionaries in France is picking a hard door to knock on—missionary work is surrounded with ideals, taboos, and nostalgia—but Gladys Clark Farmer makes it swing…
For several decades Bingham, Utah was a turbulent mining town. Built on the edge of the “greatest hole on earth,” its inhabitants slaved for gold and then for copper. One day Bingham disappeared, consumed by…
Wright Morris once said, “The ‘subject’ of Wolfe, Hemingway, and Faulkner, however various the backgrounds, however contrasting the styles, pushed to its extremity, is nostalgia.” He should have included Fitzgerald, and even then the list…
Though set in Salt Lake City, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a “Mormon novel”, even in the way that Scowcroft’s The Ordeal of Dudley Dean is—which does not mean it will not interest Mormons.…
