Miltons and Shakespeares of Our Own

Orson F. Whitney’s “Home Literature” (1888)

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Orson F. Whitney (1855–1931) was a renowned Mormon man of letters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a journalist, newspaper editor, educator, poet, and historian. When Whitney delivered his “Home Literature” address, he was thirty-three and recently returned from a mission to England, where he edited the Church’s Millennial Star. At the time, he was bishop of a Salt Lake City ward that he would lead for twenty-eight years. The grandson of the Church’s second bishop, Newel K. Whitney, Orson would later serve twenty-five years as an apostle.

The occasion for Whitney’s speech was the annual summer conference of the YMMIA (Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association) held June 2–3, 1888. Although primarily for Church youth and their leaders, this weekend gathering was a de facto general conference of the Church, consisting of several hours-long sessions of speeches and many musical performances by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others. Thousands attended.

Over time, Whitney’s “Home Literature” address has been received as a prophetic blessing upon Mormon authors and artists, summed up in Whitney’s heady proclamation, “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”¹ As an accomplished orator, Whitney used his hortatory rhetoric to move the youth toward better appreciation of the world’s literary achievements and greater confidence in achieving their own. Home literature meant more than Mormon-authored poetry or novels; it meant becoming at home with literature’s powers and scope; it meant matching those powers to the scope of Mormon belief and the breadth of Mormon experience.

“Home Literature” would be the term used by later Mormon man of letters Eugene England to label the LDS literary period from 1880 to 1930. This period marked the first flowering of an independent Mormon literature attempting to fulfill Whitney’s vision—though, as England notes, such writing was largely amateur fiction and poetry of a didactic nature.² Home literature still labels a genre of popular writing that emerged in the LDS book market in the 1970s (mostly historical, young adult, or romance fiction) that is largely by, about, and for Mormons.

The origins of Home Literature, however, were not, in fact, literary. Leading up to Whitney’s speech had been decades of Mormon economic enterprises known collectively as “home industries”—such as sugar beet cultivation as a cash crop, a local silk industry, and especially the many home-produced goods families made and marketed via Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Home literature in 1888 would have been understood by Whitney’s audience as a rhetorical adaptation of home industries, and it would have suggested a similar sense of spiritual purpose and pride of community production.

The rhetoric of a special, self-sufficient culture was actually at the root of the Church’s nascent youth program. What would become the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association (YWMIA) began in 1870 as a young ladies’ retrenchment society whose purpose was “to effect reform in dress, to resist the influences of the world, in fashion, and to set the fashions of Zion for themselves.”³ Two decades on, the Church’s youth program would include young men and a much broader scope, but the idea of setting Zion’s own fashions, creating culture by one’s own standards, remained: “Above all things, we must be original,” Whitney asserts. “Our literature must live and breathe for itself. Our mission is diverse from all others; our literature must also be.”

Serious Mormon literary efforts soon followed Whitney’s call for a home literature. But preceding all of this was a manifest LDS commitment to oral communication. Debating clubs in Salt Lake City predated the Church’s youth program. Then, as the MIA groups became integral to Mormon life between 1870 and 1890, these created Church-wide opportunities for practicing public address. By the time Whitney spoke in 1888, instruction in practical rhetoric had been so formalized in the youth program that each local association routinely submitted statistics to the general leadership on the number of declamations, or practice orations, given. For example, for the year ending May 31, 1888, a total of 1,705 declamations were reported to have been given across thirty member associations—as well as a total of 6,487 “Testimonies Borne.”⁴ Thus, when the youth gathered at conferences like the one at which Whitney spoke, they were observing models of the kinds of speakers the Youth program was already actively preparing them to become.

In his speech, Whitney uses a youthful zeal to appeal to Zion’s youth: “You must be in earnest. You must feel what you write, if you wish it to be felt by others. If the words you speak are not as red-hot embers from the flaming forge of a sincere and earnest soul, they will never set on fire the souls of your hearers.” To such romanticized earnestness Whitney adds the language of prophetic speech: “In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in earth.”

Shoring up those low foundations and reaching such high ambitions would require serious work, including due appreciation of the broader world of books and literature. This is why Whitney begins with and circles back repeatedly to a core passage of LDS scripture, a latter-day commandment that has been a hallmark of Mormon education to this day: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”⁵

Whitney has clearly taken that charge seriously himself. Interestingly, while he equates literature with learning, he does not equate the “best books” with scripture alone; indeed, he urges a wider view:

Literature means learning, and it is from the “best books” we are told to seek it. This does not merely mean [scripture]. But it also means history, poetry, philosophy, art and science, languages, government—all truth in fact, wherever found, either local or general, and relating to times past, present or to come.

Here the expansiveness of classical liberalism intersects the expansiveness of Mormon theology. He is invoking the Greek concept of paideia or the Roman studia humanitatis—exposure and engagement with the breadth of human culture. But this is not simply preparation for adulthood or public life; this is education for the eternities. Mormons are taught to understand God, and themselves, as forever in development, in mutual and permanent progression.⁶

Whitney’s ideals for education were complemented by an effort to implement them. In the same meeting, the YMMIA leadership announced a five-year course of reading for Mormon youth, to include works of history and science, as well as both “general literature” and “home literature.”⁷ Organized church programs would prove to be a long-standing mechanism for Mormons to steep themselves in literary works for study and imitation. If the Mormon people could not have their own Shakespeare without reading his sonnets or appreciating Hamlet, then they must do that reading. And they did.⁸ The formal study and appreciation of literature begun in the LDS youth program in the late 1880s would be furthered within the women’s Relief Society, where for sixty years (from the 1910s to the 1970s), one in four monthly lessons were on appreciating specific literary works or authors.⁹

Learning to write was also built into the youth organization, with local MIA groups gathering statistics on essays both read and written. The Church sponsored multiple periodicals expressly as outlets for budding authors. The Contributor magazine (1879–96), where Whitney’s address appeared, had been given its title to encourage Mormon youth to submit and publish their amateur work.¹⁰ In various Church magazines for decades to come, there would be articles analyzing “the best books,” lesson materials on literary works and authors, articles about how to write, and a dizzying array of amateur poems, stories, and contributor essays.

Whitney’s call for a Mormon literature was answered by both Church members and Church programs. His vision was realized in substantive ways through curricula, activities, contests, and ample opportunities to publish. Growing up in the 1970s, my own literary ambition was fueled by getting a brief article published through a Church writing contest. My upbringing was also very much shaped by the MIA program that, among other activities, provided ideal circumstances for performing on a stage and speaking at a pulpit.

Whitney’s “Home Literature” provided an animating vision for Mormon youth and LDS artists of future generations. His dual legacy is to have inspired a humanistic breadth to Mormon education and to have motivated generations of aspiring authors and artists to bring to their craft a Mormon sensibility and purpose. It is also worth noting that Whitney’s literary vision was delivered orally, and that even within the speech’s written form it retains the dynamism of the spoken word with its rallying rhythms and elevated tones. “A world awaits you,” he proclaims, “rich and poor, high and low, learned and unlearned”—the parallel antitheses building up the emotion. “All must be preached to; all must be sought after; all must be left without excuse”—the repeated and parallel openings further amplifying feeling. “And whither we cannot go, we must send; where we cannot speak we must write; and in order to win men with our writings we must know how and what to write.” Here, he is enjoining the literary but doing so through the ear-pleasing patterns of anadiplosis and alliteration. He is reveling in the performative escalations of oral eloquence. It is as though, even in ink and a century later, Whitney is still using a voice to be heard in a room filled with thousands.

Home Literature (1888)

Orson F. Whitney¹¹

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

—Doctrine and Covenants 88:118

The words I have quoted are the words of the Prophet Joseph Smith; or rather, they are the words of the Almighty through him to this people. A people who are popularly supposed to be enemies of education, despisers of learning, haters of books and schools, and of everything, in fact, that is pure, ennobling and refined. A greater mistake was never made, a crueler wrong was never committed, a more heinous moral crime was never perpetrated than when the “Mormon” people, [the people of] the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were thus made odious in the eyes of mankind. For, if it be a crime to filch from an individual his good name, that “immediate jewel of the soul,” compared with which, as the poet tells us, to steal one’s purse is to “steal trash,” what must it be to rob a whole community of reputation? A community, too, with such a mission as ours; the spiritual enlightenment of a world, the salvation of the human race, the education, for this life and the life which is to come, of all who can be persuaded to enter the garden of God and partake, freely, of the precious fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, which, in the truest sense, is also the Tree of Life. To rob such a people of their good name, thus limiting their usefulness, and hindering them from fulfilling their great mission, which is to draw all men unto Christ by means of knowledge, wisdom, and learning revealed from heaven and recorded in the best of books, is indeed a crime, not only against the immediate victims of the slander, but a crime against God and humanity.

But it is not my present purpose to pursue the subject to which this train of thought would naturally lead. It suffices me to know, and to testify, that this people are the friends, not the foes, of education; that they are seekers after wisdom, lovers of light and truth, universal Truth, which, like the waters of earth, or the sunbeams of heaven, has but one Source, let its earthly origin be what it may.

“Truth is truth, wher’er ’tis found,
On Christian or on heathen ground,”

and worthy of our love and admiration, whether far or near, high or low, whether blazing as a star in the blue vault of heaven, or springing like a floweret from the soil.

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith.”

Why did the Lord so instruct his Prophet? Why did the Prophet so teach his people? It was because God had designed, and his prophet had foreseen, a great and glorious future for that people. Chosen himself in weakness, so far as this world’s wisdom was concerned, as a foundation stone of the mighty structure which is destined to tower heavenward, reflecting from its walls and glittering spires the splendors of eternity, he knew there must come a time, unless God, who cannot lie, had sworn falsely, when Zion, no longer the foot, but as the head, the glorious front of the world’s civilization, would arise and shine “the joy of the whole earth”—the seat of learning, the source of wisdom, and the centre of political power; when, side by side with pure Religion, would flourish Art and Science, her fair daughters; when music, poetry, painting, sculpture, oratory, and the drama, rays of light from the same central sun, no longer refracted and discolored by the many-hued prisms of man’s sensuality, would throw their white radiance full and direct upon the mirrorlike glory of her towers; when the science of earth and the wisdom of heaven would walk hand in hand interpreting each other; when philosophy would drink from wells of living truth, no longer draining the deadly hemlock of error, to poison the pure air with the illusions of sophistry; when love and union would prevail; when war would sit at the feet of peace and learn wisdom for a thousand years; when Zion’s sons and Zion’s daughters, as famed for intelligence and culture as for purity, truth and beauty, “polished after the similitude of a palace,” would entertain kings and nobles, yea, sit upon thrones themselves, or go forth, like shafts of light from the bow of the Almighty, as messengers and ambassadors to the nations.

Joseph saw all this. He knew it was inevitable; that such things were but the natural flowers and fruits of the work which God had planted. The roots of the tree might not show it so well—their mission is to lie hidden in the earth despised and trampled on of men—but the branches in a day to come would prove it. Joseph knew, as every philosopher must know, that purity is the natural parent of beauty; that truth is the wellspring of power, and righteousness the sun of supremacy. He knew that his people must progress, that their destiny demanded it; that culture is the duty of man, as intelligence is the glory of God. Rough and rugged himself, as the granite boulders of yonder hills, typical of the firm, unyielding basis of God’s work, he knew, and his brethren around him knew, that on the rough, strong stones of which they were symbolical—the massive foundations of the past—the great Architect would rear the superstructure of the future; that the youth of Israel, their offspring, would be inspired to build upon the foundations of the fathers, and yet would differ from their fathers and mothers, as the foundations of a building must differ from the walls and spires.

What shall I say, my young brethren and sisters, what can I say to awaken in your hearts, if perchance it sleeps, the desire to realize this glorious anticipation? Alas! What can my poor pen indite? What can my feeble tongue utter to rouse within you this determination? I can only call upon God, in humility, to make my words as sparks of fire, to fall upon the tinder of your hearts and kindle them into flame. That from this hour your souls may be lit up with the light of your glorious destiny, that you may live and labor for God and his kingdom, not simply for yourselves and the perishable things of earth.

[. . .]

But what has all this to do with literature? you ask. More, perhaps, than is at first apparent. It is by means of literature that much of this great work will have to be accomplished: a literature of power and purity, worthy of such a work. And a pure and powerful literature can only proceed from a pure and powerful people. Grapes are not gathered of thorns, nor figs of thistles.

I am not here, my friends, to tickle your ears with tinkling phrases, to deliver a learned lecture on Greek and Roman mythology, to quote Hebrew and Latin, or stun you with sound and bewilder you with a pedantic display of erudition. No! Experience has taught me that it is the heart, not simply the head we must appeal to if we wish to stir the soul. The intellect may shine, but it is the bosom that burns and warms into life every movement that is born to bless humanity. Therefore, speak to your hearts, and I would rather say three words by the power of the Holy Ghost than lecture here for three hours on the fables of Greece and Rome.

Wake up! Ye sons and daughters of God! Trim your lamps and go forth to meet your destiny. A world awaits you: rich and poor, high and low, learned and unlearned. All must be preached to. All must be sought after. All must be left without excuse. And whither we cannot go, we must send. Where we cannot speak we must write. In order to win men with our writings we must know how and what to write. If the learned will only listen to the learned, God will send them learned men to meet them on their own ground and show them that “Mormonism,” the Gospel of Christ, is not only the gospel of truth but the gospel of intelligence and culture. The Lord is not above doing this. He is merciful to all men, not willing that any should perish or have it to say they were unfairly dealt with. For over fifty years the gospel has been preached to the poor and lowly. It will yet go to the high and mighty, even to kings and nobles, and penetrate and climb to places hitherto deemed inaccessible. Our literature will help to take it there; for this, like all else with which we have to do, must be made subservient to the building up of Zion.

But remember this, ye writers and orators of the future! It is for God’s glory, not man’s. Let not vanity and pride possess you. Without humility there is no power. You must be in earnest. You must feel what you write, if you wish it to be felt by others. If the words you speak are not as red-hot embers from the flaming forge of a sincere and earnest soul, they will never set on fire the souls of your hearers. The days of buncombe and bombast are over. Over? They never had a beginning. Nothing really is that is not founded on fact.

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom: seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

The advantages of learning over ignorance are so self-evident as to need no dissertation. Knowledge is power, in this world or in any other. The Prophet Joseph is authority for the saying that “a man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge.” That “it is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance”; “for,” says he, “if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power in the other world, as evil spirits will have more knowledge and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth.” The Prophet also says that whatever principles of intelligence we attain to in this life, they will rise with us in the resurrection; and if one soul by its diligence and faithfulness acquires more knowledge than another, it will have just so much advantage in the world to come.

How little, then, they know of “Mormonism,” who say and think it is opposed to education. “With all thy getting, get understanding” is no less a part of the “Mormon” creed than it is one of the pearls of the wisdom of Solomon.

“Seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

The formation of a home literature is directly in the line and spirit of this injunction. Literature means learning, and it is from the “best books” we are told to seek it. This does not merely mean the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the book of Doctrine and Covenants, Church works and religious writings—though these indeed are “the best books,” and will ever be included in and lie at the very basis of our literature. But it also means history, poetry, philosophy, art, and science, languages, government—all truth in fact, wherever found, either local or general, and relating to times past, present, or to come.

[. . .]

It is from the warp and woof of all learning, so far as we are able to master it and make it ours, that the fabric of our literature must be woven. We must read, and think, and feel, and pray, and then bring forth our thoughts, and polish and preserve them. This will make literature.

Above all things, we must be original. The Holy Ghost is the genius of “Mormon” literature. Not Jupiter, nor Mars, Minerva, nor Mercury. No fabled gods and goddesses; no Mount Olympus. No “sisters nine,” no “blue-eyed maid of heaven,” no invoking of mythical muses that “did never yet one mortal song inspire.” No pouring of new wine into old bottles. No patterning after the dead forms of antiquity. Our literature must live and breathe for itself. Our mission is diverse from all others, our literature must also be. The odes of Anacreon, the satires of Horace and Juvenal, the epics of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, the sublime tragedies of Shakespeare these are all excellent, all well enough in their way, but we must not attempt to copy them. They cannot be reproduced. We may read, we may gather sweets from all these flowers, but we must build our own hive and honeycomb after God’s supreme design.

We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not exhausted. His brightest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in earth. Let the smile of derision wreathe the face of scorn. Let the frown of hatred darken the brow of bigotry. Small things are the seeds of great things, and, like the acorn that brings forth the oak, or the snowflake that forms the avalanche, God’s kingdom will grow, and on wings of light and power soar to the summit of its destiny.

Let us onward, then, and upward, keeping the goal in view; living not in the dead past, nor for the dying present. The future is our field. Eternity is before us.

“New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of Truth.
Lo! before us gleam her campfires,
We, ourselves, must pilgrims be;
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly
Through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the future’s portal
With the past’s blood-rusted key.”

I do not mean to depreciate, or speak slightingly of the literature of the past: such of it, at least, as is worthy of the name. Far be it from me to utter one word that might reasonably be so construed. I wish I had power to tell you what I think literature has done for the human race: what men of letters have accomplished in all ages, from Moses to Herodotus. From Herodotus to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Goethe and Carlyle; men who have poured the rich treasures of inspired thought and intelligent research into the lap of humanity, giving birth to civilization and filling earth with fame and glory. I would also speak of the press, that modern giant, that great engine of power, scattering far and wide the embers of intelligence, kindling on ten thousand times ten thousand hearthstones the fires of thought and noble aspiration; the newspaper, the daily history of the world, champion of truth and defender of the oppressed. How mighty its mission, how far-reaching its influence, how invincible its power! Oh, that it should ever be prostituted, dragged in the mire, degraded to ignoble ends! But alas! it often is so.

Therefore, choose between the false and true, between the unreal and the genuine. “Seek ye out of the best books—the best newspapers—words of wisdom.” Write for the papers, write for the magazines—especially our home publications—subscribe [to] them and read them. Make books yourselves that shall not only be a credit to you and to the land and people that produced you, but likewise a boon and benefaction to mankind.

It is impossible to compute in figures, or express in words, the blessings that books and bookmakers have been to humanity. Let me quote from one whose masterly attempt is perhaps halfway successful. Says Carlyle:

“In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb, mournful wrecks and blocks: but the books of Greece! Their Greece, to every thinker. still very literally lives.”

“With the art of writing, of which printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced.” “The writer of a book, is not he a preacher, preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men, in all times and places?”

[. . .]

“Men of letters are a perpetual priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life .. In the true literary man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness; he is the light of the world; the world’s priest; guiding it like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time.”

Let us now, for a moment, in the light of this noble interpretation, contemplate the work of a book, a book with which we are all more or less familiar.

Nearly four hundred years have passed away since Columbus discovered America. He found here what? Forests and Indians, and tropical fruits; little else. But they who came after him found more. Peeping from the crust of the earth, north and south, east and west, were the relics of a civilization that had put to shame the glory of Egypt in her palmiest days. Nations had risen and fallen on this fair land before, whose fame and power the strength of Rome and the wealth of Asia would have paled as stars before the sun. Whence came they? What were their names? Why had they fallen? None knew. The sad sea waves and the sighing winds answered not, but continued to chant in mournful numbers their solemn requiem for the dead. The natives could not tell, except in tales and traditions as vague and shadowy as the legends of the Druids, or the runic fables of the Norsemen. Who, then, would answer? One day a little boy went into the woods and prayed. God answered him and gave him more than he asked. A book came forth by the power of God; a buried record hidden in a hill. It told the story of the past, it prophesied of the future, and from that hour, Joseph Smith, the despised Mormon Prophet, became the real discoverer of America.

My brothers and sisters—fellow laborers in the vineyard of our Lord—let me hope if I have said anything, it is something that will stimulate and encourage you to press onward in the work of God. Follow not after the world. Avoid the snares of Satan. Be true to yourselves and loyal to your mission. Ye are the “hope of Israel.” The heavens are watching you, and the earth is waiting for you.

“Awake, awake! Put on thy strength, O Zion! Put on thy beautiful garments”—the garments of wisdom and learning, that it may no longer be said of thee, with even a semblance of truth, or a shadow of reason, that thou art not what we say thou art, and all that the Lord thy God has said thou shalt be. Arise, shine, for thy light will come, and the Glory of the Lord will rise upon thee! “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” The star of truth has risen; the Sun of Righteousness will come; the night of error is past, and above the eastern hilltops, even now, are breaking the golden splendors of the dawn.

Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Gideon Burton is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he teaches Renaissance literature, literature of the Latter-day Saints, and rhetoric.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

1. This signature phrase is cited in the first major anthology of LDS literature: Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert, eds., A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (Brigham Young University Press, 1974), 203. The phrase is regularly quoted by LDS leaders, educators, and artists—often to criticize current writers for not living up to this prophesied potential, as in Boyd K. Packer, “The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord,” Brigham Young University Studies 16, no. 4 (1976): 577. See also Heather B. Moore, “Do We Have ‘Miltons and Shakespeares of Our Own’?” Meridian Magazine, October 27, 2011, https://latterdaysaintmag.com/article-1-8842/. Since 2007, the Whitney Awards have been given by Storymakers, an LDS authors guild, to honor Mormon authors in various genres who help to fulfill Whitney’s vision of elevating the literary arts. See how it began at https://storymakersguild.org/whitney-awards/faq.

2. Eugene England, “Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects” in Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the United States, ed. David J. Whittaker (BYU Studies, 1995): 455–505. See source online at http://mldb.byu.edu/progress.htm, accessed July 1, 2024. Representative of the Home Literature period was Nephi Anderson’s Added Upon (Deseret News, 1898), an ambitious, unpolished, novelization of the Mormon plan of salvation that proved popular for decades.

3. Junius F. Wells, ed., “Y.M.M.I.A. Conference,” The Contributor 9, no. 8 (June 1888): 314.

4. “Statistical Report for the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations for the Year Ending May 31, 1888,” The Contributor 9, no. 8 (1888): 320. Statistics also tallied the numbers of books owned, the numbers of manuscripts written, and how many essays were read among their members. 5. Doctrine and Covenants 88:118.

5. Doctrine and Covenants 88:118.

6. “The works of God continue, / And worlds and lives abound; / Improvement and progression / Have one eternal round.” William W. Phelps, “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” Deseret News, 1856. See source online at www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/music/ songs/if-you-could-hie-to-kolob, accessed July 2, 2024.

7. “A Course of Reading,” The Contributor 9, no. 8 (June 1888): 306–12.

8. In the 1930s and again in the 1950s, the official curriculum for some thirty-seven Relief Society lessons was devoted to studying Shakespeare’s plays.

9. See Relief Society Magazine Index (1914–1970), BYU Library, https://lib.byu.edu/ rsmag.

10. “That the thoughts and expressions of the young people of the Territory will be interesting to their companions, and that in writing for the press their thoughts will gain volume and solidity, seems to us reasonable, and cause sufficient for a publication devoted to them. It is for this reason . . . we have undertaken to publish a periodical that will represent the associations, and that will foster and encourage the literary talent of their members. This is the mission of the CONTRIBUTOR, the name of which has been chosen that it might say to every young man and every young lady among our people, having literary tastes and ability, Write.” Junius B. Wells, ed., The Contributor 1, no.1 (October 1879): 12.

11. Orson F. Whitney, “Home Literature,” The Contributor 9, no. 8 (June 1888): 297–302.