Spencer W. Kimball and the founding of the Association for Mormon Letters

On April 20, 1976, a group of LDS literature and history scholars met in the conference room at the Historical Department in the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City. They decided to create a Mormon literary association, and began planning for an October 6 symposium at which the Association for Mormon Letters would be launched. On July 27, between the first planning meeting and the October symposium, Leonard Arrington, the Church Historian, was called to meet with the full First Presidency, including President Spencer W. Kimball, to explain and answer questions about the proposed organization.

Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (1935-) set the process of creating the association in motion. She was a scholar then working at the LDS Historical Department, focusing at the time on autobiographies and diaries written by pioneer-era women. On March 11, 1976, she sent a letter to a group of friends, on Historical Department letterhead, inviting them to a meeting at the Historical Department. Her boss, Leonard Arrington, gave her permission to hold the meeting in the department’s conference room.[1] The invitees were: Davis Bitton (Assistant Church Historian), Richard Cracroft, Bruce W. Jorgensen, Neal Lambert, and Steven Sondrup (BYU English Department faculty members), Robert Rees (UCLA and editor of Dialogue), Mary Bradford (American University), Lowell Durham (Deseret Book), Eugene England (LDS Institute), Clifton Holt Jolley (Deseret News and a BYU graduate student), and Lavina Fielding (The Ensign).[2] Many of these people had been involved in the study of Mormon literature, which had blossomed over the previous decade.[3]

Beecher described the meeting in an introduction to the first Proceedings of the Association for Mormon Letters, which appeared in Dialogue in 1978. “Bob Rees called it a ‘summit meeting of the Mormon literati,’ the group which gathered April 20, 1976, in the conference room of the Church’s Historical Department. Actually it was just a group of people with interest in the question of the literary merit, if any, of the diaries and journals, letters and autobiographies of the Latter-day Saints. The meeting was to have lasted two hours. It was hoped that at the end of this time each participant, imbued with a sense of the importance of the material, would leave determined to study pieces of Mormon personal literature from his or her own particular point of view. But one hour into the afternoon it became apparent that there was too much to be done in the study of Mormon letters generally. Discussion of diary-as-literature broke down; instead, an organization was generated, an organization whose purpose would be to foster scholarly and creative work in Mormon letters and to promote fellowship among scholars and writers of Mormon literature. They named it the Association for Mormon Letters.”[4]

Lavina Fielding Anderson (1944-) and Eugene England (1933-2001) were also key participants in that first meeting, and would continue to be leading members of AML over the next two decades. England was then teaching at the University of Utah’s LDS Institute of Religion, and he would begin teaching at Brigham Young University in 1977. Anderson is a scholar and editor who was at that time an editor at The Ensign in Salt Lake City. As this was before she was married, she was still known as Lavina Fielding. She gave her recollections in a tribute she wrote about England soon after his death.[5]

[The] Association for Mormon letters [was] founded with the specific purpose of fostering literary criticism. Its genesis lay in a meeting which Maureen Ursenbach Beecher called among a group of friends in the fall of 1976 to discuss the quality and availability of Mormon personal narratives. Maureen was then a member of Leonard J. Arrington’s group of historians and holder of a Ph.D. in comparative literature. (Leonard not only heartily seconded Maureen’s hosting of this meeting but delivered a paper at the first meeting.) Eugene England and I were among the eight or ten people who came. Gene tossed out the question, ‘How could we go about organizing a group focused on the criticism of Mormon literature?’ Then he patiently listened as the lively conversation ranged over the “why” and “what” aspects of the question as well for about an hour. Obviously it was a discussion that could have gone on for years, but Gene glanced at his watch and said abruptly, ‘I’ve got to go. Maureen, why don’t you chair a steering committee?’ Then he walked out. We dutifully shifted, on the spot, from academics to activity. Maureen chaired that steering committee, formally organized the Association for Mormon letters, and persuaded us that the name should be ‘for Mormon letters,’ not ‘of Mormon letters.’ She also served as its first president, with Gene and I among her successors.

The steering committee, composed of Beecher, Lambert, Jolley, Sondrup, and Fielding, met again on April 27, finalized the name of the organization, and made plans for an opening symposium, to be held on October 4 in the same Historical Department conference room. Beecher wrote an announcement of the organization’s founding and sent it to Rees for publication in Dialogue’s next issue. On June 26 a large number of invitations to join AML and a call for papers for the first symposium, still scheduled to be held at the Church Office Building, were printed and sent out.

Lavina Fielding Anderson, however, has stated that after the first April 20 meeting “the [Church] bureaucrats had an absolute fit, terrified that somebody might think Leonard was sponsoring a new, intellectual and possibly anti-Mormon organization.”[6] In particular, Earl Olsen, the Church Archivist, voiced his concern. This probably led to the involvement of the First Presidency.

On July 15, F. Michael Watson, the First Presidency’s secretary, contacted Leonard Arrington and told him that the First Presidency wanted to meet with him “to discuss the Association for Mormon Letters”. The meeting was held on July 27.[7] The following account by Arrington is taken from Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1999 (Signature Books, 2018) 2:217-221.

I was there on the 25^thfloor in their suite of offices by just before 8:00. President Kimball came to the door of the board room and invited me in at about one minute to 8:00. Present were President Kimball, President [N. Eldon] Tanner, and President [Marion G.] Romney, Brother Watson, the secretary, and myself. Brother Kimball asked me to open the meeting with a prayer. After the prayer he asked me to go ahead. I told him that I had nothing to do with the Association for Mormon Letters but I was glad that they called me in because I was able to find out the story on them in order to review it for the First Presidency. I then explained that a group of persons interested in Mormon literature teaching at BYU, the U[niversity] of U[tah], and with Church magazines had met in April in our conference room to discuss Mormon diaries and other literary works, at which time Brother Davis Bitton [an Assistant Church Historian] had talked to them about Mormon diaries. This was a group of approximately 15 people. After they had been together for an hour or so they decided it might be a good idea to organize a formal association and elected a committee of five people to convene a meeting in October for organizing purposes and to write a suitable constitution and to prepare a program; also to give a title to the organization. The committee consisted of Maureen Beecher, chairman, Lavina Fielding, Clifton Jolley, Steven Sondrup, and Neil Lambert. They had now issued a brochure convening the group on October 4 and with the permission of Elder [Joseph] Anderson[8] and our executives expected to convene in the conference room of the Historical Department. I read the statement on the purpose of the organization which was to foster studies of Mormon literature.

They then began a series of questions. Why was it called Association for Mormon Letters? I explained that it was a group of professional people, all of whom were Latter-day Saints, and had in mind uniting their profession with their faith, so they were primarily interested in Mormon literature. They couldn’t very well use the title Mormon Literature Association because the initials would be MLA. MLA is the nationally known Modern Language Association, so they came up with the Association for Mormon Letters.

Question: Would you mind reading off for us the names of the persons who were among the 5 who were at that first meeting? I read off the names of the persons and Brother Kimball said, ‘It must be my not being aware of our people, but I don’t recognize but one or two names. Are these our greatest LDS writers?’ I replied, ‘No, there was no pretense that these were great writers. These were people who taught literature at BYU and elsewhere and so they were studying the lives and writings of our great writers.’

Question: Do you yourself know all of those people and are they good Latter-day Saints? I replied that I knew personally all of them but Steven Sondrup and that they were all active members of the Church. I mentioned that some of them were bishops and stake presidents, counselors to stake presidents, Relief Society presidents, and so on, and that I had no fear that any of them would embarrass the Church.

Question: Would they plan to publish a magazine like Dialogue? I replied that as far as I knew there was no intention to start a new magazine, that some of them had written for Dialogue and no doubt would continue to write for Dialogue, but that this was just a small group of a few dozen people and certainly they could not support a magazine even if they had intentions of doing so.

Question: Would they be apt to publish books? I replied that some of them would be publishing books certainly, but not under the auspices of the AML. The association itself certainly would not be in a position to sponsor publications of any kind and I thought there was no intention that they ever would, at least in the near future.

Question: Isn’t there a danger that if the association met in the conference room of the Historical Department this would infer a direct or indirect connection with the Church? I answered that they wanted to meet in Salt Lake City because of conference and [a] central location. They did not want to meet at the University of Utah because nearly all of them were BYU professors so they regarded this as a kind of neutral ground. I said I would ask the leaders to make very clear to the members that there was absolutely no sponsorship from the Historical Department of the Church nor any sponsorship or connection with the Church as such. I also said that no Church officer as such would be an officer of this organization. Certainly I would not serve as an officer nor either of the assistant Church Historians.

I said that I wanted to inform them that they had invited me to deliver a paper on Vardis Fisher[9] and his Mormon heritage and that I would plan to do this unless the First Presidency counseled me against it. There followed a series of questions about Vardis Fisher, of what I planning to say about him, and so on. President Kimball asked all of these questions and seemed to be particularly interested in this. When he asked me what the principal object of my paper would be, I said to present the image of the Church in a more favorable light than it is customarily held among the admirers of Vardis Fisher. President Kimball seemed to be quite concerned on the nature but did not counsel me against it.

Question: Isn’t there already an association for studying western literature? I mentioned the Western Literary Association and its history and activities. I mentioned that the editor of the magazine and secretary-treasurer of the association was or had been J. Golden Taylor, President Kimball’s half-brother-in-law. He asked me if J. Golden Taylor was a good writer. I told him not especially good. He said, ‘I didn’t think so.’ He asked me to tell him briefly of his work at Utah State University and at Colorado State which I did. He seemed to nod his head that he recognized the truth of what I said, and said that many years ago when J. Golden was a bishop at BYU he came to see him, President Kimball, then an apostle, and had a talk. He told President Kimball at that time that he thought the authorities of the Church should call in BYU professors more often and get their advice and counsel. President Romney and President Tanner smiled at that and maybe a hint of a smile from President Kimball as well. President Kimball then remarked, ‘You see he was well along in the process of leaving the Church then, I suppose.’ . . .

President Kimball then said, ‘If you feel that there cannot be any harm in this organization, then I see no reason why we should object. I hope you will keep us informed of it and its activities.[’] I said that I would—and I think I should write the First Presidency a report after their first meeting. President Kimball said also he thought it should be made very clear to the members that there was absolutely no connection with the Church, and I said I would make that clear to the organizing committee so they could convey that when they had their meeting . . . .[President Romney then complimented Arrington on his performance in a recent TV interview.]

President Tanner then asked me some questions about Maureen, how she was getting along, and the work she was doing, and so on. I told him that as one of the organizing committee I was sure she was playing an important role in AML, and as long as she made it clear that she was doing this as a professional person and not as a member of our staff that I would not discourage her from this. President Tanner seemed to nod in agreement with that as did President Kimball. . . . [More discussion about Beecher and her family. Then a discussion about Arrington’s four and one-half year tenure as Church Historian, and his accomplishments.] President Kimball said, ‘Well, you have been doing good work, and we appreciate all that you and your staff do. Thank you very much for meeting with us this morning and informing us on these matters we have asked you about.’ I thereupon left the meeting at 8:31, having been with them for more than half an hour.”

On August 10, the AML Steering Committee discussed possibilities for locations for the symposium, indicating that they had changed their plan to meet at the Church Historical Department. This may have been because of concerns that the association could be seen as sponsored by the Church. It also may have been a result by the good response the public announcement received, requiring meeting in a larger venue. By the end of the month the association announced that the symposium would be held in the Empire Room of the Hotel Utah.

The October Symposium was a great success, with the room at full capacity for all of the sessions. Leonard Arrington commented that they should have shown more faith by booking a larger room.

The symposium’s program was as follows:

  Morning Session

1. 1. Leonard Arrington, “The Mormon Heritage of Vardis Fisher”
   2. Bruce Jorgensen, “Heritage of Hostility: The Mormon Attack on Fiction in the Nineteenth Century”
   3. Richard Cracroft, “Bishop Potts and Elder Dunbar: Max Adeler’s Much-Married Mormons.”
   4. Richard Cummings, “Tension: Mormon Literature Facing Its Time,”

Luncheon Speaker: James Arrington, “Here’s Brother Brigham” (discussion/performance)

Afternoon Session

1. 1. Davis Bitton, “Writings Engendered by the Martyrdom of Joseph Smith”
   2. “Being a Mormon and a Poet”: Emma Lou Thayne, Arthur Henry King, John S. Harris

At the conference’s business meeting, articles of incorporation were presented and accepted by the membership. The articles declared the organization’s purpose to be “to foster scholarly and creative work and interest in the field of Mormon letters, and to promote fellowship and communication among scholars and writers interested in Mormon literature.”[10] Beecher was elected the first president, Lambert as Vice-President, and Sondrup the executive secretary-treasurer. Plans were made for the publication of an AML Newsletter, and for holding another symposium in fall 1977. A symposium (or annual meeting) has been held every year since then. Eugene England was in a serious car accident in August 1976, which may have been the reason he was not part of the first symposium’s program and not among the first officers of the organization.[11]

Although historians, including members of the Church Historical Department, were key figures in the founding of the AML and at its first meeting, in the following years their activities, including the study of pioneer diaries and other historical literary material, largely shifted away from the AML and into the conferences and other activities of the Mormon History Association (which was founded in 1965, with the encouragement of Leonard Arrington), while the AML conferences and activities tended to focus on Twentieth Century and contemporary writing. Currently, however, the AML’s Vice President and President-elect is an employee of the Church History Department (as it is known today), the first time that has been true since Maureen Beecher in 1976-1977.

It is not known whether the AML has been the subject of a First Presidency meeting since 1976.

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[1]A copy of the March 11 letter can be found in the Richard H. Cracroft Papers, held in the BYU L. Tom Perry Special Collections. I understand that there is an April 1976 entry in Leonard Arrington’s diary about the AML’s founding meeting. However, that entry is not included in the 2018 edited version compiled by Gary Bergera, and I have not yet examined the full diaries, which are kept in the Utah State University archives.

[2]Many of the details of the early years of the AML’s activities are found in meeting minutes and correspondence collected as “Association for Mormon Letters Records, 1975-1983.” Held at the Utah Historical Society, MSS B 47, Box 1. 8 folders.

[3]Although Mormon literature goes back to the start of the movement, an organized study of Mormon literature began in the decade before the AML was created. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought was founded in 1966, and it provided the first stable independent platform for Mormon literary work and criticism. In Autumn 1969 it published a special issue--“Mormonism and Literature”–edited by Robert Rees and Karl Keller. Sunstone magazine began publication in 1974, and it published Mormon plays, as well as short stories and poetry. Also, in 1974 the first Mormon literature anthology, A Believing People, was produced by BYU professors Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert as a textbook for a BYU Mormon Literature course. That same year, Dialogue held a roundtable on Mormon literature in its winter issue, featuring essays by Eugene England, Bruce W. Jorgensen, and Karl Keller. In 1975, Cracroft and Lambert published a collection of contemporary short stories, Twenty-two Young Mormon Writers.

[4]“Introduction”. Proceedings of the Association for Mormon Letters. In Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 11:2, Summer 1978, p. 12.

[5]Lavina Fielding Anderson. “Tending the Garden with Eugene England”.  Irreantum 3:3, Autumn 2001, p. 40-42. Anderson gives the AML’s organizational date as Fall 1976 in this article, but contemporary sources prove that it occurred in April 1976.

Beecher wrote the following prospectus for the April 20 meeting.

Mormon Literature–April 20

1. Some things that need to be explored:

• • What are any special criteria for judging and possible ways to promote autobiographical and confessional forms of literature, these being the kinds most valuable in the Mormon tradition?
  • What are any special implications of Mormon metaphysics for content and style in literature?
  • What do our millennialist expectations – or simply our commitments to consecrate all to the Kingdom—imply about priorities in writing and evaluating literature?

2. Some things that need to be published:

• • Editions of unpublished, uncollected, or out-of-print diaries, letters, poetry, sermons, etc: Woodruff, G. A. Smith, Joseph Millett, L. L. Dalton, B. Young letters and sermons, Emmeline Wells, Maurine Whipple, Juanita Brooks, David Wright, etc.
  • Biographies: Orson Spencer, Thomas Kane, Louisa Greene Richards, Orson F. Whitney, Eliza R. Snow, etc.
  • Guides to diaries, letters, etc.
  • Comprehensive bibliography (primary and secondary sources) on Mormon literature.
  • More of the increasing amounts of good writing now being done.

3. Some things that need to be encouraged:

• • Larger, more sympathetic but also more sensitive and discriminating Mormon audience for drama, fiction, poetry, diaries, etc.
  • Understanding on part of Church leaders and opinion-makers at all levels of possible and past contributions of Mormon writers to building the Kingdom.
  • More good writing.

4. Some possible means:

• • Assistance to Elder Robert Hales and Church magazine editors in their efforts to publish special and extra issues to get good Mormon literature and articles an esthetics into their regular issues. (Marginal note: Special lit issue)
  • Organized encouragement, especially at BYU and the Church Historical Dept., of both students and older professionals in accomplishing 1 and 2 above.
  • Disciplined, cooperative efforts to accomplish 3 above – on the part of all of us who speak and write about Mormon literature
  • Formation of some kind of association of Mormon writers and critics of literature to encourage all of the above and to give each other both sustaining aid and powerful criticism.
  • Founding of a journal, sponsored by such an association as in above, to publish valuable literature from our heritage, new writing, and good criticism.

[6]Private correspondence with the author.

[7]Gary James Bergera,editor. Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1999.Signature Books, 2018. Volume 2, pages 217-221.

[8]Managing Director of the Church Historical Department.

Although President Kimball and the First Presidency largely backed Arrington and the openness that he brought to the Historical Department, several members of the Quorum of the Twelve were concerned with his choices. G. Homer Durham, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, replaced Joseph Anderson as director of the Historical Department in 1977 and began restraining Arrington and the division’s activity. In 1982, the Church released Arrington as Church Historian and transferred the Historical Division to BYU, creating the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. For several years the office of Church Historian went unfilled. (Leonard Arrington. Adventures of a Church Historian. University of Illinois Press: 1998.)

[9]Arrington’s wife, Grace Arrington, first became interested in the Church because of her reading of a Reader’s Digest condensed version of Fisher’s novel Children of God.

[10]AML Newsletter, 1:1. January 1977, p. 3.

[11]Following is a list of the members of The Association for Mormon Letters as of October 4, 1976 (AML Newsletter 1:1). Linda Adams, Penelope Allen, Marilyn Arnold, Stanford Andrews, Leonard Arrington, Kathryn R. Ashworth, Susan H. Aylworth, Maureen Beecher, Eloise M. Bell, Francine Bennion, Sherilyn Bennion, Davis Bitton, Mae Blanche, Wayne C. Booth, Mary Bradford, Juanita Brooks, Benita L. Brown, William and Marilyn Brown, H. E. Burnham, Scott Cameron, David Canaan, Marilyn M. Capell, Kris Cassity, Bruce B. Clark, Marden Clark, Aileen H. Clyde, William Conway, Richard Cracroft, Marshall Craig, R. J. Cummings, Kathy O. Czerny, Afton Day, Wilfried Decoo, L. V. Donaldson, R. G. Ellsworth, Eugene and Charlotte England, Ron Esplin, Lavina Fielding, Mary Firmage, Ed Geary, J. S. Harris, Linda Harris, Edward L. Hart, D. Hunter, B. S. Jacobs, Heber Jacobsen, Dorla Jenkins, Janet Jensen, L. J. Johnson, Clifton Jolley, Bruce W. Jorgensen, Eileen G. Kump, Neal Lambert, Clinton Larson, Glen Leonard, Jon C. Lloyd, A. Logie, Karen Lynn, T. E. Lyon, B. and E. McKay, F. M. McKiernan, M. R. Miller, Jill Mulvay, Christine Norman, Lena Marie Pack, Jeri Parker, Elinore Partridge, Jaynann M. Payne, Virginia Pearce, M. D. Pederson, Levi Peterson, Lenet H. Read, Susan E. Ream, Patricia Russell, Candadai Seshachari, Neila Seshachari, Elizabeth Shaw, T. E. Shoemaker, Linda Sillitoe, Alice C. Smith, Dennis V. Smith, Steven P. Sondrup, P. and Sh. Swensen, Stephen L. Tanner, George S. Tate, Lucile C. Tate, Douglas H. Thayer, Emma Lou Thayne, Robert K. Thomas, Laurel Ulrich, Neal and Sue Van Alfen, Maurine Jensen Ward, Christene Waters, Gwen Webster, Marilyn D. Whipple, William Wilson, Glena D. Wood, Ruth R. Yeaman. Addenda: John B. Harris, Charles Tate.