LDS literary culture gaining public if not church recognition

Mormon book culture has changed from producing mainly popular romance and fantasy literature to now including high-end literary works, writes James Goldberg in the LDS Substack newsletter Wayfare (June 29). Such popular authors as Stephenie Meyer of the Twilight series and Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy and science fiction author, are seen as the leading lights of a cottage industry of writers with LDS backgrounds. But Goldberg writes that Mormon literary culture has gone to the next level with the writer Steven Peck and his 2009 novel A Short Stay in Hell, which was recently chosen to appear in Penguin UK’s Vintage Classics series, alongside works from authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood. The inclusion of the book in this series appears to be the first time a Mormon author, working with LDS themes such as the eternal progression of the universe, has been embraced by a publisher that serves as an arbiter of the literary canon. Goldberg points out that two of the 20 bestselling writers of the 21st century are Latter-day Saints. “That’s fifty times more representation at the top than you’d expect from a group that makes up 0.2 percent of the world population.” 

Peck, Meyer, and Sanderson are part of a much larger literary landscape, suggesting a “gradual Renaissance in people producing more literary writing about the faith, creating aesthetically rich texts intended for Latter-day Saint audiences,” Goldberg writes. In his Utah county, “there are probably as many writing groups as there are Latter-day Saint meetinghouses. There are readers and book clubs galore. We have a strong publishing landscape. Deseret Book survived a difficult economic transition that killed many midsized publishers. There are a handful of Latter-day Saint small presses, journals, and writing contests. Over the past ten years, there has been significant growth in the body of literary work about Latter-day Saint themes and experiences written by members around the world and translated into English,” he adds. 

Comparing the growth of Mormon literature to the output of Catholic and Jewish voices is not really fair, given that in 1900, there were only about 230,000 Latter-day Saints. “We ought to assess our output and infrastructure by comparison to religious groups that also emerged out of the nineteenth century, like the Baháʼís and Seventh-day Adventists, the Ahmadiyyas and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some great creativity has come out of all those communities, but for a faith our age and size, we ought to be quite pleased with what we’ve accomplished.” While there has been a growth of organizations like the Association for Mormon Letters, Storymakers, Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, and the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, Goldberg concludes that “many of the most literary-minded Latter-day Saints don’t read Mormon literature at all…A quarter into the twenty-first century, Mormon literature is arriving. It’s time for our attitudes to catch up.”