Mormon fiction
Its history is commonly divided into four sections as first organized by Eugene England: foundations, home literature, the "lost" generation, and faithful realism.
During this "home literature" movement, church-published magazines published many didactic stories and Nephi Anderson wrote the novel Added Upon.
Glenn Beck, Jason F. Wright, and Richard Paul Evans have written inspirational fiction featured on New York Times bestseller lists.
Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer, and Brandon Sanderson are award-winning popular authors of science fiction and fantasy novels.
Shannon Hale, James Dashner, and Ally Condie are popular authors of young adult science fiction and fantasy.
In 1844, Parley P. Pratt published what is commonly cited as the first work of LDS fiction, the didactic Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil.
Early Mormon leaders like Brigham Young and George Q. Cannon condemned novels for wasting time, a rhetoric that persisted until the 1880s.
[12] "Historical-regional" novels were prevalent during this era, which Karl Keller called the "best fiction to come out of the Church" and criticized it as a byproduct of "a history and lifestyle that has already been created".
[1][14] Maurine Whipple won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Prize in 1938 and published The Giant Joshua (1941), which presented plural marriage as a test of faith similar to colonizing Utah's desert.
[16]: 92–94 In an analysis of the "lost" generation, Terryl Givens argues that the novels from this era were "too compliant with the voices of criticism and cynicism to produce an art fully worthy of its subject.
[1] Starting in the 1970s, BYU professors Douglas Thayer and Donald R. Marshall began to write skillful stories that explored Mormon thought and culture in a critical but fundamentally affirmative way.
[17] Also in 1987, Orson Scott Card published Seventh Son, which England wrote "raises troubling questions about the supposedly sharp borderline between magic and religion.
Later, when church members began voicing opinions online on social media and in the Mormon blogosphere, communal criticism and doctrinal speculation became more common and unlikely to lead to ecclesiastical action.
[24][non-primary source needed][25] Hales lists the work of several authors as falling under this category, including Arianne Cope's The Coming of Elijah (2006), Coke Newell's On the Road to Heaven (2007), Todd Robert Peterson's Family History (2007), Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (2010), and Steven L. Peck's The Scholar of Moab (2011).
[10]: 59 Dean Hughes is known for the series Children of the Promise, set in World War II, and Hearts of the Fathers, which follows the same family into the 1960s.
Anita Stansfield's Mormon romance, First Love and Forever (1994), sold over 40,000 copies and paved the way for similar novels,[27] such as those by Susan Evans McCloud, Rachel Nunes, and Jennie Hansen.
[29][30] LDS authors' success in genre fiction is perhaps because, as Rosalynde Welch argues, "Mormon culture values superior performance of shared forms over the originality of invention.
[31] Building on Welch's work, Jana Riess argues that LDS authors are adept at conforming to genre expectations, and that the way they form and interact with their reading and writing communities contributes to their success.
[33] In a New York Times article, Shannon Hale theorized that LDS authors are drawn to genre fiction because they prefer happy endings to bleak or tragic stories.
[1] Also in the 1980s, Tracy Hickman helped to develop the gaming fiction genre, writing adventure models connected to TSR's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and co-authoring Dragonlance novels with Margaret Weis.
[41] According to Terryl Givens, science fiction works by Mormons commonly explore ideas "at the margins of conventional thinking", like life on other planets and apotheosis.
[3]: 320 According to Preston Hunter at adherents.com, a quarter of novels that won Hugo or Nebula awards had an LDS author or references to Latter-day Saints and Utah.
[46] Walton, Carol Lynch Williams, and Cheri Earl planned the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers annual conference starting in 2000.
Brandon Mull, Aprilynne Pike, Jessica Day George, and Kiersten White are also prominent writers of middle grade and YA fantasy.
[50][10]: 49–50 The science fiction and fantasy conference Life, the Universe, & Everything, held annually in Provo, Utah, often highlights LDS authors.
[54] While a new professor of creative writing at Brigham Young University (BYU), Brian Evenson published a short story collection, Altmann's Tongue.
[60][57] Also in 2002, Covenant Communications, an imprint of Deseret Book,[61] declined to publish Anita Stansfield's The Captain of Her Heart because "of its reference to premarital sex".
[62] In a 2003 interview with Irreantum, Jana Riess said that "increased inventory conservatism" was a trend with Christian publishers at the time and called it a "sound marketing decision" but "troubling from a literary perspective".
[59] In 2013, Cedar Fort Publishing's imprint, Sweetwater Books, deleted gay author Michael Jensen's reference to his partner in his cover bio.
Jensen requested that his bio reference his partner, and Lyle Mortimer threatened to publish the book without giving authors credit for their work.
