The New York Times summarized her significance in an obituary:
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 12— Fawn McKay Brodie, [was] a historian whose biography of Thomas Jefferson was a best-seller in 1974, ....'Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,'' Mrs. Brodie's last published book, focused on an affair that Jefferson allegedly had with a slave woman.
Mrs. Brodie had taught recently in the history department of the University of California at Los Angeles. At her death, she had just finished ''Richard Nixon: The Child and the Man,'' a biography that grew out of a series of lectures. She took early retirement from U.C.L.A. to complete the book.
.....
Mrs. Brodie, a niece of David O. McKay, a president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 50's and 60's, also wrote a biography of the founder of the Mormon Church.
''No Man Knows My History, the Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet,'' published in 1945, included a controversial examination of the sources of Smith's religious vision. Mrs. Brodie requested and was eventually granted excommunication by the Mormon Church after the book was published.
.... Brodie was born....in Ogden, Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1934 and did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where she met and married Bernard Brodie, who became a professor of political science at U.C.L.A. He died in 1979.
......Brodie's far-ranging curiosity is exemplified in her biography of the 19th century writer and explorer Richard Burton. She had access to previously unused information in writing The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967).
Burton was an extraordinary figure: One blurb says:
... He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina [in disguise and] at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika Burton's passion was not only for geographical discovery but also for the hidden in man. His enormous erudition on the sexual customs of the East and Africa, long confined by the pruderies of his time, finally found expression in the notes and commentary to his celebrated translation of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights.
Fawn Brodie sketches in her biography a domestic picture of the life he and his wife led in Damascus in 1869. Isabel had brought from England:
.... [F]ive dogs — a St Bernard, two brindled bull-terriers, two Yarboroughs —[and then] the Burtons added a Kurdish pup, a camel, a white donkey, three goats, a pet lamb, a Persian cat, as well as chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, guinea fowls...Later a Moslem leader gave them a panther cub that had been trapped in the desert, which soon became their favourite. "He used to sleep by our bedside..." Isabel wrote.
What none of Richard Burton's biographers have grasped, in fact, is the dimension his search for a secret knowledge played in his life.
......[T]he whole of his turbulent life Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika Burton's passion was not only for geographical discovery but also for the hidden in man. His enormous erudition on the sexual customs of the East and Africa, long confined by the pruderies of his time, finally found expression in the notes and commentary to his celebrated translation of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights. For this major biography of one of the most baffling heroes of any era, Fawn M. Brodie has drawn on original sources and a newly discovered collection of letters and papers.
.... [F]ive dogs — a St Bernard, two brindled bull-terriers, two Yarboroughs —[and then] the Burtons added a Kurdish pup, a camel, a white donkey, three goats, a pet lamb, a Persian cat, as well as chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, guinea fowls...Later a Moslem leader gave them a panther cub that had been trapped in the desert, which soon became their favourite. "He used to sleep by our bedside..." Isabel wrote.
What none of Richard Burton's biographers have grasped, in fact, is the dimension his search for a secret knowledge played in his life.
......[T]he whole of his turbulent life Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika Burton's passion was not only for geographical discovery but also for the hidden in man. His enormous erudition on the sexual customs of the East and Africa, long confined by the pruderies of his time, finally found expression in the notes and commentary to his celebrated translation of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights. For this major biography of one of the most baffling heroes of any era, Fawn M. Brodie has drawn on original sources and a newly discovered collection of letters and papers.
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