Although Brodie grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees,[10] her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church was a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma.
[12] From 1930 to 1932, Brodie attended Weber College, a two-year institution in Ogden, then owned by the LDS Church, where she became an accomplished public speaker and participated in intercollegiate debate.
She gained access to some highly restricted materials by claiming to be "Brother McKay's daughter", a subterfuge that made her feel "guilty as hell".
In an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, he developed the notion of golden plates and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon, based in part on View of the Hebrews, an earlier work by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith.
Brodie asserts that at first Smith was a deliberate impostor; but at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, he became convinced that he really was a prophet, though never escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon.
[22] Newsweek called Brodie's book "a definitive biography in the finest sense of the word", and Time praised the author for her "skill and scholarship and admirable detachment".
Brodie was especially annoyed by the review of novelist Vardis Fisher, who accused her of stating "as indisputable facts what can only be regarded as conjectures supported by doubtful evidence".
[25] Although No Man Knows My History criticized many foundational 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, an official periodical of the church, said that many of the book's citations were 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".
After some desultory investigation of other possibilities, she settled on a biography of Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania during the Civil War and the Reconstruction era.
Brodie believed that previous historians had unduly vilified Stevens, and she relished the prospect of rebuilding a reputation rather than, as in her Joseph Smith biography, tearing one down.
In the view of students of historiography such as Ernst Breisach, all biographers are to some degree psychohistorians, and any biography that refused to examine motives, character traits, and the depth of personality would be flat and uninteresting.
[35] Brodie made a number of acquaintances among psychoanalysts who helped her evaluate Thaddeus Stevens, notably Ralph R. Greenson, with whom she developed a close personal and professional relationship.
Brodie's interest in psychology during this period was heightened by family problems: her mother attempted suicide three times, the second by cutting herself with a Catholic crucifix, and the third (which succeeded) by setting herself on fire.
Major historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, including David Herbert Donald and C. Vann Woodward, praised the biography.
Current not only urged W. W. Norton to publish a paperback edition of Brodie's book, but wrote a blurb praising the author for writing "more imaginatively" and "more resourcefully...than any other Stevens biographer".
For instance, she noted that immediately before and after Burton wrote about his mother, he talked "about cheating, decapitation, mutilations, smashings—all the stories and metaphors are violent, negative, and hostile".
[41] The publication of three acclaimed biographies allowed Brodie to become a part-time lecturer in history at the University of California, Los Angeles although she had not earned a Ph.D. (Both her bachelor's and master's degrees were in English.)
As a woman, Brodie met some resistance from the large and overwhelmingly male history faculty, but her specialty in the current field of psychohistory aided her original appointment and her eventual promotion to full professor.
But Dale Morgan told Brodie that Madeline Reeder McQuown, a close friend, had nearly completed a huge manuscript on Young.
She decided to build on several recently published articles on the historical controversy describing a reported sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a quadroon slave said to be the half-sister of his late wife.
[47] Working from Winthrop Jordan's Black on White (1968), Brodie also used Dumas Malone's documentation of Jefferson's activities to correlate his stays at Monticello with the conception period of each of Sally Hemings' children, whose births he recorded in the Farm Book.
[citation needed] Brodie was interviewed on NBC's Today Show, and the book quickly "became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles", as well as among political people.
[54][55] Mainstream historians had long denied the possibility of Jefferson's relation with Sally Hemings, although such interracial liaisons were so common that by the late eighteenth century, visitors remarked on the numerous white slaves in Virginia and the Upper South.
"[57] Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, educated women of the planter elite, also wrote about many interracial families in the era shortly before the American Civil War.
Since then the Foundation has revised exhibits and tour commentary to reflect Jefferson's paternity of all Hemings' children, and it has sponsored new research into the interracial society of Monticello and Charlottesville.
As a liberal Democrat, Brodie had developed a "repellent fascination" with Nixon, a man whom she called "a rattlesnake", a "plain damn liar", and a "shabby, pathetic felon".
Writing in The New Republic, Godfrey Hodgson questioned both her psychoanalytic approach and her motives: "[W]e are in danger of having the insights of psychotherapy used as a tool for character destruction, certainly for libel, potentially for revenge.
"[68] According to J. Philipp Rosenberg, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography because it was written by an author who disliked her subject.
[71] In accordance with her wishes, friends spread her ashes over the Santa Monica Mountains, which she loved and had successfully helped to protect from real estate development.