Access Utah

When it was published in 1997, The Wall Street Journal called Terryl Givens' “The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy” "one of the five best books on Mormonism." Now, in the wake of a tidal wave of Mormon-inspired artistic, literary, and political activity--ranging from the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon, to the HBO series Big Love, to the political campaign of Mitt Romney--Givens has updated the book to address the continuing presence and reception of the Mormon image in contemporary culture. “The Viper on the Hearth” shows how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances.