Brodie, Fawn M (McKay) (1915–1981)

US historian and biographer. Her first subject was the founder of the Mormons, in No Man Knows My History: the Life of Joseph Smith (1945). She wrote biographies of Thaddeus Stevens (1959), Sir Richard Burton (1967), and famously, Thomas Jefferson (1974). Her biography of Richard Nixon (1981) was published posthumously.

She was born in Ogden, Utah, and raised in one of the preeminent families of the Mormon Church from which she was excommunicated on charges of heresy after her Joseph Smith biography. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1936. She joined the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles 1968–77 In 1975 she was named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times.