A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints
Section Introduction: Biography and Autobiography
Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert, editors
I now ask God's blessings upon all who shall
read this history of my life; may you be faithful to do the will and
work of our Heavenly Father; that you may have peace, joy and
happiness, an increase of wisdom and knowledge and the power of God;
outside of this there are no promised blessings. --Christopher
Layton's Journal
Biography and its sister, autobiography, are genres congenial to
Mormonism. Both genres appeal to each man's desire and instinct to
commemorate and eternize the fact that he, too, lived and here is
tangible proof of it. Both appeal to man's natural instinct to
moralize about the nature of life and his role in it. Both appeal to
man's great inherent curiosity about himself and his desire to
understand how others are similar to, and different from, him. Both
genres allow man to examine, especially in Mormondom, God's
providential hand in man's life. In this sense biography and
autobiography are akin to Mormon history, for in much Mormon writing
the three genres trace the hand of Providence in leading a chosen son
or daughter to eternal life; all three become, in a sense, forms of
spiritual autobiography.
Thus Mormon biography and autobiography have flourished. From the
beginning, Mormon magazines have devoted space to accounts of trials
and successes of missionaries, converts, pioneers, and the Brethren,
or General Authorities. Orson F. Whitney's biographies of Heber C.
Kimball and Wilford Woodruff are still read, and Parley P. Pratt's
autobiography has recently been reissued in a popular edition.
Biographies of Joseph Smith, written by George Q. Cannon, John Henry
Evans, and Hyrum Andrus, continue to vie successfully with the
blacklisted but important biography by Fawn McKay Brodie, No Man Knows
My History. And Mormons continue to read Preston Nibley's incomplete
but readable biography of Brigham Young, while neglecting the richer
yet flawed "gentile" versions of the past several decades.
Treatments of the lives of leaders, especially of presidents of the
Church, continue to be popular among the Saints, who prefer brief and
faith-promoting accounts of spiritual events rather than comprehensive
and scholarly examinations of influences, intellectual development,
and intimate details of the lives of famous Mormons. A recent book of
autobiography demonstrates very well the vitality of the form' One of
the General Authorities, Hartman Rector, Jr., and his wife Connie,
themselves converts to the Church, have edited a book, No More
Strangers, in which they present the story of their own conversion
along with accounts by other outstanding Mormon converts such as Alan
Cherry, a black; Milo Baughman, a prominent designer; John S. Staley,
a former Catholic; and a number of other Latter-day Saints who have
gathered to Mormonism from many nations and walks of life.
In the selections in this section we include a variety of accounts
from such diverse people as Parley P. Pratt and John Taylor, General
Authorities, mule-skinner Daniel W. Jones, newspaper-man S. A. Kenner,
college president Karl G. Maeser, and sheriff Will Brooks. We also
include a piece of biography about a Mormon grandmother as penned by
Florence Bailey, a non-Mormon. In this diversity, however, there is a
kind of unity, for each selection demonstrates that viewing the world
through Mormon spectacles does, in fact, make a difference.
|