Fawn McKay Brodie audio-visual collection, 1946-1995

Fawn McKay Brodie (1915-1981) was born Fawn McKay in Ogden, Utah and grew up in nearby Huntsville. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Utah in 1934 and in 1936 completed a Master of Arts degree at the University of Chicago, where she met and married Bernard Brodie. After graduation began researching the history of the Book of Mormon and, in 1945, published No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, which resulted in her 1946 excommunication from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After publishing two more biographies, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959) and The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967), Brodie began to teach history and American political biography at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in 1974 and Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character in late 1981, nine monts after her death from lung cancer earlier that year.