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Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915 – January 10, 1981) was a biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for ''Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History'' (1974), a work of psychobiography, and ''No Man Knows My History'' (1945), an early and still influential non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.〔This article usually uses the terms "Mormon" and "Mormonism" to describe the entire movement that originated after the publication of the Book of Mormon and Latter-day Saint and LDS to refer to the largest of the Latter day Saint sects, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City.〕 Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS Church) family, Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago. She married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which incorporate insights from Freudian psychology. Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation"〔Fawn Brodie, ''No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith'' (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd. ed., 1971), 403.〕 has been described as both a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar () represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life"〔Jan Shipps, ''Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons'' (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 165. However, the Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley claimed he was immediately struck "by the brazen inconsistencies that swarm in its pages." ''No, Ma'am, That's Not History'' (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1960), 5.〕 and as a work that presented conjecture as fact.〔''The New York Times Book Review'', November 25, 1945, 5.〕 Her best-selling psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson was the first serious study to examine evidence related to accounts that he had taken his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine, and Brodie concluded such accounts were true. According to J. Philipp Rosenberg, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography when written by an author who disliked the subject.〔: "Most critical was political scientist J. Philipp Rosenberg...."After finishing the Nixon book, I have an urge to demand that psychobiographers be barred from writing about people they dislike. While this would create a huge gap in the literature, it would do wonders for the reputation of psychobiography."〕 ==Early life== Fawn McKay was the second of five children of Thomas E. McKay and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, about ten miles (16 km) east. Both her parents descended from families influential in early Mormonism. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was president of Brigham Young University. Her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop, president of the LDS Swiss-Austrian mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Brodie's paternal uncle was David O. McKay, an apostle in the LDS Church when Brodie was born, who later became the ninth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.〔''(Notable American Women )''〕 Despite the prominence of her family in the church, they lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt.〔The farmhouse Brodie lived in was owned not by her parents but by the extended McKay clan, the McKay Family Corporation. Her relatives visited regularly and for extended periods each summer, but the corporation refused to provide indoor plumbing, although the Thomas McKay family desperately wanted it, and the corporation could afford to pay for it. The mortgage debt grew to thirty-five thousand dollars, "an astronomical sum for the time" that Fawn's father bore for the next thirty years "like Atlas, without hope and without lament." .〕 The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing.〔"Fawn bitterly recalled that as she 'grew older and became aware of the social implications of (privy's ) permanence () became. . .a scandalous anachronism. The coming of guests, whether our parents' friends or our own, always meant a moment of apologetic explanation, which was humiliating to make or even to overhear.'" In winter, human wastes in chamber pots had to be thawed on the kitchen stove before they could be disposed of. .〕 Fawn early demonstrated precociousness. At three she memorized and recited lengthy poems. When a whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool Fawn's sister Flora, who was two years older, Fawn more than kept pace. Introduced to school in 1921, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade; when she lost the school spelling bee to a twelve-year-old, "she cried and cried that this bright boy, twice her age, had spelled her down."〔Flora McKay Crawford in .〕 At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, ''The Juvenile Instructor''; at fourteen she was salutatorian of Weber High School. Although Fawn grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees,〔There was a blessing at every meal, and the McKay children were not allowed to play either outside or inside the house. Even the sewing of doll clothes was forbidden. The "Word of Wisdom" was obeyed, and no coffee, tea, or alcoholic beverages were consumed.〕 her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma.〔Flora McKay recalled that her mother "hated the temple ceremonies so bad that it was just ghastly." Among other things, her mother rejected the Mormon view of eternity and instead insisted that "eternity is one generation to another." .〕 According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic" while accompanying him there.〔Brodie said that two years of "playing hostess to itinerant apostles, plus some sophisticated literature and the overwhelmingly impressive spectacle of twenty centuries of European art really shocked her out of that provincialism in which twenty-five years in Huntsville had tried to enshroud her." Brodie was pleasantly surprised that at her mother's age, "there could come such delightful blossoming of courageous heresy." .〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fawn M. Brodie」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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