1988  AML Award: Biography

Presented to:
Levi S. Peterson

For:
Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian

---

Levi Peterson’s study of Mormonism’s first modern -- and most heroically self-made -- historian is already acclaimed as the winner of the David W. and Beatrice C. Evans Biography Award, given by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, and readers along the Wasatch Front and elsewhere applaud its richly enthralling, highly readable story of the life of a great woman, a fiercely loving and fearlessly critical maverick riding the edge of the herd as long as body and brain would endure. In its breadth and depth of research, its generous and judicious use of that research, and its sky-wide, canyon-deep, native-born sympathy for Juanita Brooks and for the native earth that nourished her and the implanted Mormon community whose history and dynamics she used her life to comprehend, Levi Peterson’s Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian honors its subject by emulation, and raises the bar a sizeable notch higher for all who will yet write the stories of Mormon lives.

---