Zenna Henderson’s The People Novels are essentially about Mormons.
Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country is an excellent read.
Another vote for Udall’s Lonely Polygamist. A very good novel in general. Of course as the title implies it’s about a heretical subsect of Mormonism.
Avoid David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife like the plague unless you just love purple prose so thick you can swim in it. The author’s a Creative Writing professor and I’m beginning to think that’s “nuff said”.
I’ve read a couple of really well researched ones about the early days (ca. 1830s-1860s) but I can’t recall the names. If you’re interested in that far back I’ll be glad to look them up.
In real life, T.D. Fitzgerald (the “Great Brain”) did indeed attend the Catholic Academy here in Salt Lake City, as there were no schools above 6th grade in his hometown of Cedar City UT, which was called Adenville in the Great Brain books…
Papa Married A Mormon is a wonderful book, one I have re-read several times over the years.
This is one of the ones I read and thought was great, though I had forgotten the title. It’s extremely well researched and has anecdotes about numerous famous and not-so-famous church founders (Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, the Pratt brothers, etc.). The apostasy of Orson Pratt, Jr., is a plot point IIRC.
Another good one that’s out of print is Batallion of Saints by Richard Wormser. (When I researched it just now I learned for the first time of the existence of a band by that name, so if it sounds familiar that might be why.) It’s based on an actual event- the Mormon Batallion who served in the Mexican War while the rest of the church was beginning the migration from Iowa (where they’d taken refuge after leaving Nauvoo) to the Salt Lake Valley.
Movies too, I think–I just watched Carnival of Souls a couple of weeks ago and AFAICT the girl drives from Kansas to Salt Lake, passing the old Saltair palace on the way.
I started Mormon Country a few months ago and then failed to continue, though I was enjoying it. I’m going to have to try again.
Thanks for all of these, everybody - good stuff. My local library’s site is down so I can’t reserve any until tomorrow, but I’ll definitely be checking out the Udall and the Stegner, and eventually getting to OSC’s Fringe books. I’m working my way through the canon.
I have read at least one of these, and you know, I never saw it. Now I do.
Even though I haven’t been to Utah in almost 30 years this was something that irked me about The 19th Wife. The crimsesolving hero drives from St. George to Salt Lake City and back in a beat up old van; he leaves late morning, spends a couple of hours at least in SLC, and is back to St. George before sunset. He made great time for a 600 mile round trip. (Theoretically possible but not very likely.)
At that it’s better than September Dawn, a horrible movie about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In that movie somebody reaches Salt Lake with the news of the massacre by riding all through the night. It’s one hell of a horse who can cover 300 miles in a night. Of course that movie had plenty of historical inaccuracies as well ranging from the minor (Brigham Young is pictured as having his famous “latter day” beardin 1857 when he was in fact still clean shaven) to the ridiculous (e.g. Jon Voight plays an elder who cut the throat of his first wife- in Utah- when she refused to be given away to an Apostle; in addition to the fact this type of stuff only happened in dime novels and “tell alls” [where even then it was usually hearsay or at most “somebody I won’t name” because of libel liability*], her son is about 5 at the time of her murder and he’s about 20 at the time of Mountain Meadows, a discrepancy of several years since the Mormons didn’t get to Utah until 1847.)
*Polygamy in 19th century Utah was a lot more low key than it is in today’s fundamentalist churches. It was never a requirement: the vast majority of men were monogamists and for polygamists only a few had more than 4 wives and only a handful had more than 10 (Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, John D. Lee and a few others). Orson Pratt infuriated other polygamists when he added new wives to his family [he had a total of 10] when he was already a step up from a pauper. People like the Jeffs [father and son] and Winston Blackmore and others who have dozens of wives and support them on welfare checks would have been abomination to the ultra separatist early Mormons.
Don’t bother with Gerald Lund. You really don’t need to put yourself through that. Unless you like reading books just to see how bad they’ll get. Then go ahead. There’s 10 of 'em to laugh your way through.
What’s all this talk about novels about morons?
I’m just here to second, third or fourth the recommendations for J.D. Fitzgerald’s books Papa Married a Mormon and Mama’s Boarding House.
I have a hardcover copy of the former book, with actual photos of the family in it. His Uncle Will was hot, and his dad was pretty good looking too.
That’s the one! I found it a good read, again, though, I don’t know how mormons would feel about it.
Just listened to A Cage Of Stars by Jacqualine Mitchard. The first scene is the protagonist, a school girl, responding to a reporter that of course, since she’s Mormon, that her dad has dozens of wives…
The first page does a good job of telling you that she’s Mormon and a wise ass.
Sorry for the slight hijack, everybody, but …
Fascinating, thanks for the info! I remember that Papa Married a Mormon says Tom went to Brigham Young Academy before going on a mission, but I don’t remember anything other than the fact that it mentioned that, and presumably that was for high school, not the 7th and 8th grades he would have spent at the Catholic Academy (at least, in the books – even though Tom ended up not going back to the Catholic Academy for the second year, in the Great Brain books).
So where can I read more information about the Fitzgeralds like you’ve found? (I never knew that Adenville was supposed to be Cedar City, for instance.) Is there a biography of the author, John Dennis Fitzgerald? Or articles somewhere?
Too funny! My youngest son just started reading The Great Brain this afternoon! I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed those books as a kid.
Of course, J.D. talked right from the start about tolerance and understanding in mostly-Mormon Adenville, UT- he & his brothers had to be able to whip every Mormon kid their ages in town, because “there is nothing as tolerant and understanding as a kid you can whip.” 
Fitzgerald also wrote a really fun book about his uncle, “Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse.” I liked it.
A few really good books with Mormon characters or themes which were not mentioned in the thread:
The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman–contemporary novel set near Toole, Utah
Riding in the Shadows of Saints by Jana Richman–memoir of riding the Mormon Trial by a solo woman on a motorcycle
Emma Lee by Juanita Brooks–short fascinating biography of an early settler in Utah, one of John D. Lee’s wives
Red Water by Judith Freeman–powerful historical novel told in the voices of three of John D. Lee’s wives
And, this September, my novel Tributary came out–it’s an unvarnished view of Mormon settlement by a strong-willed misfit who finds her own line to follow through life
Very much fiction, but I enjoyed the book Higher Authority by Stephen White. It has the same characters as the rest of his Alan Gregory mysteries (which are also quite good), but from a different main character POV. It’s a good read, and you don’t need to have read the other books to follow along.
I am currently searching for a book I read in High School about the early Mormons…this one is about a girl whose father died and she was traveling west with a wagon train to go to Utah. She was used to hunting and fishing and thats how she provided for her ill father. She was supposed to marry a non Mormon man, whose mother had re-married into the Church. Anyway, her fiance was a dr, more or less and the Mormons didn’t agree with that and he used whiskey to disinfect the girls hand where a barb from a fish hook had broken off into it and he was thrown off the wagon train.
I do not have the title, or the name of the author and I simply do not know where to look for this book. It is an awesome book. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
I find it hard to resist doing a bit of a “commercial” for Harry Turtledove, much of whose work I greatly like. A warning, though: the following is Turtledove’s speciality of alternative history – “his” Mormons as follows, differ markedly in a couple of ways, from the Mormons in “Our Time-Line”.
There is an ongoing element re the Mormons and Utah, all through Turtledove’s “Southern Victory” or “TL-191” novel series, which runs from 1881 to 1945. Premise of the series being, that the Confederacy successfully secedes in 1862; after which the continental US as we know it, is split between the United States and the Confederate States, in a situation of mutual loathing.
In Turtledove’s series, it is a different deal between the Mormons (mostly, as “in reality”, living in the state of Utah) and the United States; from that between Mormons and the rest of the USA, in OTL. Turtledove’s United States treats the Mormons more than a little harshly; they thus don’t get the opportunity of – as in OTL – making a point of being model citizens. Turtledove’s Mormons are perpetually agitating for Utah to become a fully independent nation, and resort to (para)-military means in pursuance of this goal. Every time the United States and the Confederate States go to war with each other (in a brief early-1880s “re-run” of the Civil War; in World War I; and in World War II), Utah erupts in armed rebellion, on the principle of “my enemy’s difficulty is my opportunity” – much grief ensues, for both parties.
Turtledove, who basically doesn’t do “heroes and villains”, on the whole depicts his Mormon characters sympathetically.