By Andrew Hall

This year marks the 90th birthday of Levi S. Peterson, widely recognized as the most significant author of Mormon literature of the last half-century. From 1978 to 2021, Peterson produced two novels, three short fiction collections, a memoir, a biography, and dozens of personal essays, all fully imbued with Mormon experience, theology, guilt, faith, and humor. Perhaps most memorably, he is the creator of “Cowboy Jesus,” a vision which diverts the protagonist of his novel The Backslider away from obsessive guilt and a hatred of God and towards an acceptance of divine and familial love. In honor of Peterson’s 90th year, I sat down for a long Zoom call to talk about his life and career. Based on what I learned from that call, I prepared this summary of his career, and provide a recommendation guide to his publications. 

Peterson was born in December 1933 in the Northern Arizona town of Snowflake, a rural town settled by Mormon pioneers. He was the youngest of 13 children in his parents’ blended family. Educators and farmers, his parents were devoted members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While the Church was a major influence on his character, so was the cowboy life of the frontier, a duality he references in the title of his memoir, A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning. Peterson describes himself in the memoir as hounded by religious doubts and temperamentally unwilling to follow all of the expected behaviors, but also full of a desire for God’s grace and highly valuing his membership in the Church.  

He served as a missionary in France and Belgium from 1954 to 1957, and studied literature at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He then began a career teaching English at Weber State in Ogden, Utah, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. He turned seriously to writing literature in 1974, at the relatively advanced age of forty-two. Modern Mormon literature was only a few years into its “Faithful Realism” stage then, with authors like Donald Marshall and Douglas Thayer producing challenging stories which explored the inner lives of Mormons struggling in the modern world.  

Peterson’s short stories and novels are largely populated by young, rural Mormon males, swimming in their hormones, making mistakes, feeling guilty, and then striving to bring themselves back in harmony with their loved ones and community. Peterson observed in his memoir, “Guilt has been one of my gifts. I excel in it. I feel guilty for all the ills of our time: for the extinction of species, the exhaustion of natural resources, the abuse of women and children, the suppression of minorities, and the general malice of human nature. Guilty characters come naturally to my fiction.”

For my Zoom conversation, Peterson attended from Issaquah, Washington, where he and his wife have retired, to be close to his daughter’s family. Peterson remains lively and engaged, willing to talk about all aspects of his writing and the state of the world. We were joined by John Bennion, a close friend of Peterson’s, and himself a leading figure in Mormon literary circles. Bennion commented, “Levi Peterson was one of my most essential writing mentors. Levi’s characters speak from the edge of Mormonism. They surprised me with their rich texture, detailed awareness of human complexity, grotesque characters and situations, and beautiful language. Levi taught me that as a writer I needed to fear nothing and that I could write about anything—drunken and sober visions, violent acts borne out of piety, sexuality in its multiflorous variety, rural people with all their oddities and strengths.”

Peterson has received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters eight times: three times for short fiction, once for novel, once for anthology editing, and once for biography, as well as two career awards for outstanding achievement.

Required reading

Luckily three of his best books to start with are all in print. 

The Backslider. Signature Books, 1986. 

The Backslider is perhaps the most celebrated Mormon novel of the late 20th century. The Signature Books blurb reads, “A young ranch hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. He is saved by an epiphany that has proved both popular and controversial among some readers, either interpreting it as an extreme impiety or celebrating it as a moving and plausible rendering of a biblical theme in a Western setting.

Along the way Frank encounters a closeted secular humanist, a polygamist prophet, a psychiatrist, a Mason, government employees, college professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs—all drawn with heightened realism reminiscent of Charles Dickens or the grotesque forms of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

The story engages readers as it alternates almost imperceptibly between Frank’s naïve consciousness and the more informed awareness of its narrator. It can be read as a love story, a satiric comedy, or a dark and sobering study of self-mutilation. It builds suspense and elicits complex emotions, among them a profound sense of compassion. More joyous than cynical, it sympathizes deeply with the plight of all of God’s backsliders.”

Richard J. Cummings commented in Dialogue, “In Levi Peterson, the backwaters of Utah . . . [have] found their very own John Steinbeck. In a sense, The Backslider is the first instance of a new genre which combines in broad strokes with subtle touches caricature, humor, theology, folklore, and plain old everyday horse sense in a way which readers will either admire or detest, but which must be approached on its own terms.” 

Juanita Books: The Life Story of a Courageous Historian of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. University of Utah Press, 1988.  (Originally titled Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian.)

AML Award Citation: “Peterson’s study of Mormonism’s first modern and most heroically self-made historian . . . [is a] 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. In its breadth and depth of research, and its sky-wide, canyon-deep, native-born sympathy for Brooks and for the native earth that nourished her and the implanted Mormon community whose history and dynamics she used her life to comprehend, Peterson honors his subject by emulation, and raises the bar a sizeable notch higher for all who will yet write.”

Losing a Bit of Eden: Recent Stories. Signature Books, 2021.

All three of Peterson’s short story collections are excellent, but Losing a Bit of Eden, a collection of his stories written in the 21st century, is the only one still in print. The Signature Books blurb reads, “His subject remains Latter-day Saints caught between the polarities of conscience and passion. Among the stories are sober tellings of rape and misogyny, defiant statements of ascendant feminism and the worship of Heavenly Mother, and—most abundantly—narratives about impermissible love that sometimes lead to heartbreak and other times forges unexpected couplings destined to last a lifetime.”

Further Reading

These books are out of print, but finding them would be well worth the effort. 

The Canyons of Grace. University of Illinois Press, 1982 (later republished by Signature Books).

His first, and probably his best, short fiction collection. One of the stories, “The Christianizing of Colburn Heights”, is one of Mormonism’s most hilarious (and heartbreaking) tales. Geoff Wichert has written, “Peterson captures the Southwestern experience with a vivid specificity few authors can match, striving to reconfigure the Mythical West by revealing the reality of life as it was on the frontier, and still is in its sparse remains. He presents a candid panorama of Mormon life that, while it may discomfort some readers, offers a much richer picture of his people’s unique, yet essentially human qualities.

Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories. Signature Press, 1983. Peterson edited this groundbreaking multi-author anthology, which includes “The Gift,” an excellent story about an American missionary serving in the Belgian city of Liège.

Night Soil. Signature Books, 1990. Peterson’s second short fiction collection. Eugene England wrote in his review, “His new collection has all the theological sophistication and seriousness of Canyons of Grace and the rich, healing humor and sense of how redemption works of The Backslider. But it has something more; it is suffused with heart-breaking mortal tenderness.”

Aspen Marooney. Signature Books, 1995.  His second novel. Signature’s book blurb reads, “In this quietly seductive novel--Peterson's latest foray into the ever-intriguing topics of memory, regret, and sin--a suspenseful ambiance is created from the backdrop of a rural high school reunion. While acquaintances interact tentatively at first, then more freely, Aspen confronts a particularly dark secret from her past. But there is also hilarity here. Despite everyone's best attempts to impress former classmates, they gradually reveal their true selves; lapsing into old habits, they demonstrate how little has changed. This makes for a particularly satisfying reunion and, for readers, a compelling vicarious experience.”

A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography. University of Utah Press, 2006. 

Peterson also wrote over a dozen personal essays on Mormonism, published in Dialogue (which he edited in 2004-2008) and Sunstone, which deserve to be brought together in a collection. The essays called for a transformation of Mormonism into a more tolerant and loving community, while encouraging fellow dissidents to remain in the community whenever possible.

Levi Peterson presented Mormonism with a new voice, a gifted, ironic, irreverent, and gentle voice that probed, analyzed, and and demythologized conventional Mormon attitudes. He found grace in unlikely places and in unlikely people, places the Lord would be, but where the self-respecting Mormon would be less likely to find herself. He was not about to affirm the propriety of Mormon complacency: instead, he was defiantly out to find the grace that touches all of us. 

Happy Birthday, Levi. Your life’s work is a true gift to the Latter-day Saints, for which I offer my gratitude.