It took this venture into the biography of a man who really interests people, and who is really liked by them, to show the Brodie method for what it is. Those of us who presumed to point out her foibles are still denounced as "flippant." But it needs no profound learning to detect crude and persistent cheating-and that was obvious. Her huge bibliography was accepted at its face value, and awarded her prize after prize.
For in that she ran not the slightest danger of offending anybody but the Mormons she told everybody exactly what they wanted to hear about Joseph Smith. She could proceed with the most slapdash methods on such neutral ground, having once established her status by her first mighty opus, which was a sure thing. When she writes about Richard Burton, who is going to bother to check up on her? Does it really make that much difference just what kind of a man he was? Is it anybody's intimate personal concern? Even when she writes about Thaddeus Stevens she is on safe grounds-few are they who love or remember him, or care about him at this distance. Now, at last, she is writing about a man whose life and character is the close concern of many students and some eminent scholars. Brodie has borrowed her scholarly methods"? who wrote about Joseph Smith is it her vaunted scholarship of which we now read, "the same appetites can be more readily gratified by those Hollywood fan magazines, with their wealth of unfounded conjecture on the sex lives of others, from which Ms. Brodie has her facts wrong, even before she loads them with unsustainable surmise."1 Can this be the same Mrs. She regularly treats us to sub-freshman absurdity on this scale, and in this detail, does not come easily. "Two vast things" wrote an eminent reviewer, "make this book a prodigy-the author's industry, and her ignorance.
Then she wrote a long biography of Thomas Jefferson, and promptly the roof fell in.
Brodie went on to produce other biographies, receiving mostly favorable but not enthusiastic reviews but nothing like the attention and acclaim accorded the Joseph Smith epic. Ministers and priests went into ecstasies about it and invariably placed it in the hands of any of their flock who wondered about the Mormons. Schools and libraries accepted it as the true and official account of Mormonism. It was instantly proclaimed to be the one definitive, authoritative book on Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Brodie wrote what purported to be a biography of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
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