As I began to study the diaries of LDS leader and poetess Eliza R. Snow at the Huntington Library, I found that she often mentioned her friends briefly, cryptically. Since she had been a plural wife of Joseph Smith (first prophet of the Mormon church) and Brigham Young (second church president), I felt that I needed good lists of Smith’s and Young’s plural spouses to identify her friends and relatives. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a reliable list of Smith’s wives, so I created one myself, identifying thirty-three women married to Joseph Smith during his lifetime. Five years later, that list had expanded to a book, In Sacred Loneliness: the Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Signature Books 1997). I was lucky enough to reach an audience with this book, which won Best Book awards from both the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association.
As a follow-up, in collaboration with Charles Hatch, I edited the diaries of Joseph Smith’s youngest wife, Helen Mar Kimball Smith Whitney: A Widow’s Tale: The 1884-1896 Diary of Helen Mar Whitney, in the “Life Writings of Frontier Women” series, at Utah State University Press (2003). This won Best Documentary Book from the Mormon History Association. As I struggled to identify all of the people, events, and cultural artifacts in Helen Mar’s diary, I was enthralled by the richness of her entries, which were sometimes fairly mundane, sometimes dramatic. I was also fascinated by this polarized period of transition for the Mormon people, when they started to give up polygamy and attempted to come to terms with the mainstream of American culture.
I’ve always been interested in early Mormon-Indian relations, which led to my next book, A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary (2013, University of Utah Press), which received Best Book award from the Utah Historical Society and the Evans Biography Award. Hamblin is one of the great western figures, unfortunately little known outside of Utah. As an explorer of Grand Canyon and Hopi and Navajo country, he endured countless hardships and adventures. As a settler in southern Utah, and Indian missionary, he acted as an uncomfortable emissary to Indians whose territory and way of life were being destroyed by white settlers. In this difficult position, Hamblin sought to use diplomacy rather than violence as a counterweight to more militarist Mormon leaders.
My next publication will be a real change of pace: a book on the Beatles, self-published: Who Wrote the Beatles Songs: A History of Lennon-McCartney (forthcoming in 2017). I’ve always collected material on the Beatles’ songwriting, and finally decided to develop it into a book. Who Wrote the Beatles Songs looks at the evidence for the songwriting of all of the Beatles songs, and takes aim at many facile stereotypes about Lennon, McCartney and the Beatles as a group. While the conventional wisdom is that McCartney and Lennon did their best work in collaboration, I will show that as they matured they wrote together less and less. Both were brilliant songwriters, and wrote many of the best “Lennon-McCartney” songs alone, without any input from the other. Lennon tended to be more interested in lyrics, while McCartney often turned his inspired focus to music.
I have a Ph.D. in Classics, and that side of me can be found in Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat and Hero (Harvard University Press, 2006), in which I show how ostensibly factual biographies of famous Greco-Roman poets were often “adapted” to conform to recurrent mythical patterns. In addition, I was simply intrigued by the scapegoat pattern in history and culture, poets getting exiled or sentenced to death for their poetry or abusive language.
