A Little Lower than the Angels (Volume 1) (Signature Morman Classics)

Sorensen, Virginia

ISBN 10: 1560851031 / ISBN 13: 9781560851035

Published by Signature Books, 1998

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # 20L11_8_1560851031

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Little Lower than the Angels (Volume 1) (Signature Morman Classics)
• Publisher: Signature Books
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560851031
• ISBN 13: 9781560851035
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

 When A Little Lower than the Angels appeared in 1942, its author and recent Brigham Young University graduate Virginia Sorensen was overwhelmed by the positive national attention. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker, noted how “convincingly [she] explores . . . the tragic, comic, and grotesque problems of plural marriage.”

Set in Nauvoo, Illinois, she tells the story of a single family, a woman and her Mormon husband, loosely based on her in-laws’ family history from the period and augmented by on-site research. The novel preceded the first scholarly treatment of Nauvoo by three years.

As an outsider, Sorensen’s protagonist is puzzled by the city’s mysteries. Gradually, however, she discovers that a neighbor’s obsession with the LDS prophet is due to her polygamous marriage to him. Even so, Mercy Baker cannot foresee the complications that her own baptism will bring.

About the Author

 Virginia Sorensen was born in Provo, Utah, and lived much of her adult life in Morocco and Florida with her husband, British novelist Alec Waugh. She is the distinguished author of eight novels (see, for instance, A Little Lower than the Angels), a collection of short stories (Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood), and as many children’s books; and winner of the Newberry Medal, an O. Henry award, and two Guggenheim fellowships. She spent a lifetime telling stories, many of which she offered to her Mormon community as their own. Literary critics have hailed her as “Utah’s First Lady of Letters.” She died in 1991.