Brigham Young: American Moses | |
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Dust jacket from the 1985 Knopf edition. |
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Author(s) | Leonard J. Arrington |
Country | United States of America |
Language | English |
Subject(s) | Brigham Young |
Genre(s) | Biography |
Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | April 1985[1] |
Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
Pages | 522 |
ISBN | 0-394-51022-4 |
OCLC Number | 11443615 |
Dewey Decimal | 289.3/32/0924 B 19 |
LC Classification | BX8695.Y7 A85 1985 |
Followed by | 1986 University of Illinois Press paperback |
Brigham Young: American Moses is a biography about Brigham Young by Dr. Leonard J. Arrington, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985.
Contents |
In 1979 Alfred A. Knopf published Arrington's well-received The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints, and later that year contracted Arrington to also write a biography of Brigham Young.[1] Until 1982, Arrington was Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had access to and drew upon diaries and letters not available to previous biographers to profile Brigham Young.[2] In the book, Arrington critically examined a major period of Mormon history, though some reviews claimed he didn't cover enough of some intriguing aspects.[3]
In 1995, Arrington explained his reasoning behind the subtitle American Moses:
Brigham was the same sort of a leader as Moses in serving people for a long period of time, in achieving their goal of entering into a kingdom blessed by God. It -- there's no -- no trick reason why I should have used American Moses. I thought Moses was a person understood by nearly everybody, and that Brigham was something for us that Moses was for the people of Israel. He led his people figuratively and quite literally, and they survived because of that leadership and their faith.[4]
In 1984, before its actual release by Knopf, Brigham Young: American Moses was the first to receive the prestigious "David Evans and Beatrice Cannon Evans Biography Award". It also won the 1985 Mormon History Association’s Best Book Award and was nominated as a “distinguished work of biography” by the National Book Critics Circle.[1]
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