Ardis E Parshall: 3 books

Published in 1853, the first American novel about the Mormons is also one of the best. John Russell, an Illinois journalist and educator, witnessed the persecution in Missouri and Illinois and generally sympathized with the Saints. The Mormoness tells the story of Mary Maverick, the heroine of the...

Dime novels probably did more than any other kind of book to turn lower- and middle-class Americans into both book owners and book readers. They were so cheap that almost anyone could afford them, and so exciting that almost everybody wanted to read them. It’s hard to tell just how many of these...

First published in 1855, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife belongs to a sub-genre of crime fiction that flourished in the Eastern United States during the 1850s.Boadicea has become increasingly important to scholars of Mormonism because it gives us a glimpse of the Mormon image in literature immediately after...