The writing of the biography was slowed by the birth of her first child and by three rapid moves to follow her husband's career, but in 1943, Brodie entered a 300-page draft of her book in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf literary fellowship; in May, the publisher judged her application to be the best of the 44 entries.
[4] In No Man Knows My History, Brodie presented the young Smith as a good-natured, lazy, extroverted, and unsuccessful treasure seeker, who, in an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, first developed the notion of golden plates and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon.
While previous "naturalistic approaches to Joseph's visions had explained them through psychological analysis", regarding Smith as honest but deluded, Brodie instead interpreted him as having been deliberately deceptive.
[5] In No Man Knows My History, Brodie depicts Smith as having been a deliberate impostor, who at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, became convinced that he was indeed a prophet—though without ever escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon.
"[14] In 2007, Bushman observed Knopf still sold about a thousand copies of No Man Knows My History annually and noted Brodie had "shaped the view of the Prophet for half a century.
[9][19] Although Brodie's literary style invited readers to identify with people portrayed in the book, critics said it relied on guesswork and sometimes outright invention of what someone may have been thinking or feeling.
Historian Marvin S. Hill urged future scholars to avoid extremes in studies of Joseph Smith and instead find a middle ground between hagiography and cynicism.
[18] Roger D. Launius considered the book a turning point from "old" to "new" Mormon history, shifting the field away from polemical supports for or attacks on faith and toward objectively understanding events in a search for truth.
There is evidence that her book has had strong negative impact on popular Mormon thought as well, since to this day in certain circles in Utah to acknowledge that one has "read Fawn Brodie" is to create doubts as to one's loyalty to the Church.
[9][27] In 1995, Roger D. Launius wrote, "The degree to which Mormon historiography has been shaped by the long shadow of Fawn Brodie since 1945 is both disturbing and unnecessary," and he worried that scholars' preoccupation with either disproving or supporting No Man Knows My History "stunt[ed]" the field by narrowing its focus to topics explored in the book.
[30] In his 2005 book Rough Stone Rolling, historian Richard Bushman, a Mormon, sought to challenge the popularity of No Man Knows My History by studying Smith's cultural context and sympathetically understanding him as an accomplished but contradictory person.
[34][29] In 2019, an opinion essay published in Theological Librarianship assessed that "contemporary scholars have found multiple flaws in Brodie's methodology and conclusions, so her work has fallen out of fashion considerably, but its impact on the field cannot be overstated".
[35] In 1946, the Improvement Era, an official periodical of the church, claimed that many of the book's citations arose 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."
"[12][36] BYU professor Hugh Nibley wrote a scathing 62-page pamphlet entitled No, Ma'am, That's Not History,[37] asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others.
"[41] In 1966, RLDS scholar and member Robert B. Flanders disapproved of the book's uncritical use of 19th-century anti-Mormon literature and criticized Brodie's "zeal to create the grand and ultimate expose of Mormonism.