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Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915 – January 10, 1981) was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History (1945), an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married Bernard Brodie, an academic who became a national defense expert; they had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.

Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith in 1945 as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation" has been described as both a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life" and as a work that presented conjecture as fact. Her best-selling psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1974, was the first modern examination of evidence that Jefferson had taken his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine and fathered children by her. Brodie concluded he had done so, a conclusion supported by a 1998 DNA analysis and current scholarly consensus.

Early life

Fawn McKay was the second of five children of Thomas E. McKay and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, about ten miles (16 km) east. Both her parents descended from families influential in early Mormonism. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was president of Brigham Young University. Her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop, president of the LDS Church's Swiss-Austrian Mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Brodie's paternal uncle, David O. McKay, was an LDS Church apostle when Brodie was born and later became the church's ninth president.

Despite the prominence of her family in the church, they lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt. The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing.

Brodie early demonstrated precociousness. At three she memorized and recited lengthy poems. When a whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool Fawn's sister, Flora, who was two years older, Fawn more than kept pace. Introduced to school in 1921, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade; when she lost the school spelling bee to a twelve-year-old, "she cried and cried that this bright boy, twice her age, had spelled her down." At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, The Juvenile Instructor; at fourteen she was salutatorian of Weber High School.

Although Brodie grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees, her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church was a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma. According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic" while accompanying him there.

Education and marriage

From 1930 to 1932, Brodie 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. She completed a bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of Utah in 1934. There she began to question core Mormon beliefs, such as that the Native Americans had originated in ancient Israel. After graduation at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College.

In high school, Brodie had begun dating a classmate, Dilworth Jensen. They wrote to each other faithfully during Jensen's long absence on an LDS mission in Europe. In June 1935, they were both accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and friends assumed they would marry. Her sister, Flora, had recently eloped with Jensen's brother, whom the McKays disliked. They encouraged Fawn to attend the University of Chicago rather than marry. She seemed to have had "growing doubts about marrying" Jensen.

At the University of Chicago, where she earned a master's degree in English in 1936, she lost her faith in religion entirely. In 1975, she recalled, "It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime. The sense of liberation I had at the University of Chicago was exhilarating. I felt very quickly that I could not go back to the old life, and I never did." She continued to write to Jensen until shortly before she married Bernard Brodie on her graduation day, August 28, 1936.

Brodie was a native of Chicago, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants, who was alienated from both his family and his family's religion. A bright graduate student in international relations, he eventually became a noted expert in military strategy during the Cold War era. The McKays were horrified at their daughter's impending marriage; Dilworth Jensen felt betrayed. David O. McKay went to Chicago to warn his niece of the family's strong objections. Out of consideration for her mother, Fawn scheduled the wedding in an LDS chapel, but of the McKays, only Fawn's mother attended. None of Brodie's family did.