Brodie, Fawn McKay

1915 - Fawn McKay Brodie, born on the 15th of September in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, about ten miles east. She was a biographer and professor of history at UCLA.

1921 - Introduced to school, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade.

1925 - At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, The Juvenile Instructor; at fourteen she was salutatorian of Weber High School.

1930 - 1932 - Attended Weber College, a two-year institution in Ogden then owned by the LDS Church, where she became an accomplished public speaker and participated in intercollegiate debate.

1934 - She then completed her B.A. in English literature at the University of Utah.

- After graduation, at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College, where she demonstrated excellent potential as a teacher.

1935 - She and Jensen were accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and friends assumed they would be married.

1936 - At the University of Chicago, where she earned a M.A.

- She married Bernard Brodie on her graduation day, on the 28th of August.

1943 - She was encouraged enough to enter her three-hundred page draft in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf literary fellowship, and in May her application was judged the best of the forty-four entries.

1944 - Finally completed her biography of Joseph Smith, and it was published the following year by Alfred A. Knopf when she was only thirty.

1946 - The LDS Church excommunicated her, and she never attempted to regain her membership.

1956 - Discovered evidence that Stevens might have killed a black girl who was pregnant with his child, complicating her attempt to rehabilitate his character.

1971 - She had a fifteen thousand dollar advance from her publisher and had presented a summary of her arguments at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

1974 - Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in February.

1980 - Became unusually tired. She was shortly diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, although she had never smoked.

1981 - Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was published.

- Died on the 10th of January, nine months before publication of the book. As death neared, the cancer spread to her brain and bones, and she experienced intense pain.

• "[Richard] Nixon lied to gain love, to shore up his grandiose fantasies, to bolster his ever-wavering sense of identity. He lied in attack, hoping to win… and always he lied, and this most aggressively, to deny that he lied."
• "A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both."