Today we’ll talk with Richard Saunders about his forthcoming biography (from University of Utah Press) Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition. This is the first biography of Dale Morgan, preeminent historian of the Latter-day Saints, the fur trade and the trails of the American West. Morgan’s work signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Leonard Arrington, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.
Richard L. Saunders is a librarian at Southern Utah University. He is the author of Eloquence from a Silent World: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Published Writings of Dale L. Morgan; and edited Morgan’s writing in Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849–1869, and Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, 1938–1970.
