In 2021, the University of Illinois Press launched the “Introductions to Mormon Thought” series of short biographies edited by Matthew Bowman and Joseph Spencer. Included to date are Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist (by Michael Austin), Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal (by Kristine L. Haglund), and Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator (by George B. Handley).
Its most recent volume, Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist by Cristina Rosetti, presents the story of the talented and highly motivated post-Manifesto polygamy advocate Joseph Musser. Like dozens of other devout Latter-day Saints, Musser married polygamously after the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto, which officially catalyzed the end of polygamy, and before Joseph F. Smith issued his 1904 Manifesto, which more firmly forbade new polygamous marriages. Musser also married a third wife in 1907, one that church leaders retroactively permitted but with the strict instruction that he was to stop promoting polygamy and enter into...
