Pioneering Mormon novelist Doug Thayer dies at 88

Douglas H. Thayer influenced generations of Mormon writers and scholars in his 54-year career at Brigham Young University, thought to be the longest tenure on faculty. As a professor, he was noted for his dry wit, generosity, and integrity in upholding tough grading standards.

Thayer, a prominent Mormon literary writer and longtime English professor at LDS Church-owned BYU, died Tuesday of liver cancer at age 88. A funeral will be held in Provo on Oct. 28.

“I have friends to this day who complain the only B+ they ever got in their straight-A career was from Doug Thayer,” said his wife, Donlu Thayer. “He never used the word ‘great’ for anything. He didn't believe in great.” Instead, when he dropped a child off at school, he would say: “Have a reasonably pleasant day.”

As a writer, he was noted as a literary pioneer for crafting realistic stories at a time when much of Mormon fiction was considered sentimental or faith-promoting. “I write about somewhat ordinary, faithful Mormons living their contemporary lives, people who stay in the church whatever their inclinations otherwise,” Thayer said in a 2007 interview.

Thayer’s work was influenced by his Provo boyhood spent roaming the Wasatch Mountains. “I always said he would have made a really good Jesuit mountain man,” Donlu Thayer said. “He was pure-hearted, an adventurer, a solitary man. He was full of virtue and Boy Scout duty.

“One of our sons said, ‘I thought everybody had a dad you could absolutely count on and trust in every way.’ Nope, not everybody does,” Donlu Thayer said. “He never did anything for the honors of men.”

Thayer’s stories published in “Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought” in the 1970s and ’80s were particularly influential. His published collections include “Under the Cottonwoods and Other Mormon Stories” (1977), “Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone” (1989) and “Wasatch” (2011). He also published four novels, including “Summer Fire” (1983) and “The Tree House” (2009), and a memoir, “Hooligan: A Mormon Boyhood” (2007). Friends and critics laud stories such as “The Redtail Hawk” and “The Clinic” as masterpieces.

“One of his principal subjects was Western America and Mormon masculinity in the 20th century,” said Bruce W. Jorgensen, a longtime colleague, neighbor and friend. Donlu Thayer, an editor, writer and lawyer, is working with Jorgensen and another colleague, John Bennion, to edit her husband’s last novel, “The Redemption of Emerson Nelsen.”

Thayer dropped out of high school to enlist in the U.S. Army, where he was stationed in Germany. After serving in the military, he returned to the country to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He earned a master of fine arts in fiction writing from the University of Iowa, then returned to Provo to teach at BYU. In 1974, he married Donlu DeWitt, and the couple went on to have six children and 21 grandchildren.

“The formative thing for him was when he dropped out of high school at 17 to join the Army,” Donlu said. “He had hardly ever left Provo, and there he was looking at bombed-out Germany. It was an earthshaking experience that features massively in his fiction, especially in his novel ‘The Tree House.’”

“He wrote fiction very much coming from a position of faith, of testimony, that was not threatening to most orthodox church members, at the same time it was well-crafted,” said Michael Austin, an English professor and executive vice president for academic affairs at Indiana’s University of Evansville. “He was the first really well-trained writer that came along that bridged that gap, that showed the dichotomy didn’t have to exist.”

“He taught us how to explore the interior life, with its conflicts of doubt and faith, goodness and evil, of a believing Mormon,” according to Bennion, a former student who became a faculty colleague.

At a September tribute at BYU, Jorgensen read two pages of Thayer’s “Summer Lost” and was pleased to rediscover how well-honed the sentences were. “They’re kinetic, their rhythms are the rhythms of the experience,” Jorgensen says. “At his best, that’s what Doug was doing. Writing like that stays put. People go to it and find that it’s still alive. He was doing what Hemingway said: He was making instead of describing.”

Funeral services will be at 1 p.m. Oct. 28 at Edgemont South Stake Center, 350 E. 2950 North, Provo, with a visitation at the church from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Another visitation will be Friday, Oct. 27, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Berg Mortuary, 185 Center St., Provo.