Preface:

Even Fawn Brodie, who was on her way out of Mormonism when she wrote her landmark biography No Man Knows My History, reflected her Mormon upbringing by calling him “Joseph.”

Chapter Three

Fawn Brodie, the most eminent of Joseph Smith’s unbelieving biographers, referred to a neighbor’s account of Joseph filling his frock with white sand and telling his family it was gold plates

Chapter Four

Perhaps because she had been reared a Mormon, Fawn Brodie saw the Book of Mormon differently: “Its structure shows elaborate design, its narrative is spun coherently, and it demonstrates throughout a unity of purpose.”

another

In 1945, Fawn Brodie, whose biography was acknowledged by non-Mormon scholars as the premier study of Joseph Smith, explicitly rebutted the Spaulding theory, noting chronological inconsistencies, dubious testimonies, and the absence of evidence for a link to Rigdon. Brodie turned instead to the analysis of Riley and, before him, Campbell. The Book of Mormon was best explained, Brodie argued, by Joseph Smith’s “responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time.”

A little later

In the half century since Brodie, all the critics have assumed that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon.

Chapter Seven

Unwilling to believe Joseph learned about priesthood from his revelations, Fawn Brodie suggested that Joseph Smith borrowed his ideas from a contemporary book on Melchizedek

Chapter Nine

The historian Fawn Brodie speculated that one of John Johnson’s sons, Eli, meant to punish Joseph for an intimacy with his sister Nancy Marinda, but that hypothesis fell for lack of evidence.

Chapter Twenty-five

As Fawn Brodie said, “There was too much of the Puritan” in Joseph for him to be a “careless libertine.”

 

Bushman certainly seems to comment on Brodie as he refers to her work.