No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith

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No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), by Fawn McKay Brodie, was the first important non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Latter Day Saint movement.

[edit] Overview

Brodie presents 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, which he partially based on an earlier work, View of the Hebrews, by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith. Brodie asserts that at first Joseph Smith was a deliberate imposter, 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."<ref>Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 165.</ref>

During her research, Brodie painstakingly turned up primary sources that had previously been neglected.<ref>New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5.</ref> Nevertheless, two weaknesses of Brodie's compelling work were her limited patience with religion and religious impulses and her tendency to transform conjectures into indisputable facts. In reviewing No Man Know My History, Vardis Fisher (himself a prolific novelist--and atheist--who remained unconvinced by Brodie’s theory) wrongly speculated that Brodie would “turn novelist in her next book.”<ref>New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5.</ref>

At nearly the same moment, Brodie's friend and fellow historian, Dale L. 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."<ref>Saturday Review of Literature, 28 (November 28, 1945), 7-8.</ref>

Although No Man Knows My History was a direct attack on critical Mormon beliefs about Joseph Smith, the LDS Church was slow to condemn the work even as the book went into a second printing. In 1946, The Improvement Era, the 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."<ref>This review was soon reprinted as a pamphlet and missionary tract. Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 110.</ref> BYU professor and LDS apologist Hugh Nibley challenged Brodie in another booklet, No, Ma'am, That's Not History, asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others.<ref>See No, Ma'am, That's Not History and a critique of Nibley's critique.</ref> Brodie herself thought the Deseret News pamphlet "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda," but she dismissed the ultimately more popular No, Ma'am, That's Not History as "a flippant and shallow piece."<ref>Bringhurst, 111.</ref>

[edit] Influence

In 1971, Marvin S. Hill, a professor 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.<ref>Marvin S. Hill, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Winter 1972)[1]</ref>

Although in research and comprehensiveness No Man Knows My History has now been surpassed by the more sympathetic Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf<ref>Curiously, Alfred A. Knopf published both works, exactly sixty years apart.</ref>, 2005), Brodie's biography--written before she drifted into psychohistory--will continue to be read both for its literary excellence and its critical view of Mormon origins.