Fawn M. Brodie

Who was Fawn M. Brodie?

Fawn McKay Brodie was a biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History, an early and still influential non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint family, Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago. She married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.

Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation" has been described as both a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life" and as a work that presented conjecture as fact. Her best-selling psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson was the first serious study to examine evidence related to accounts that he had taken his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine, and Brodie concluded such accounts were true. According to J. Philipp Rosenberg, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography when written by an author who disliked the subject.