The Backslider Hardcover - 1992

"About the author"
Born in 1933, I was raised in Snowflake, a small Mormon town in northern Arizona. The isolated town gave me an intrigue with Mormon villages wherever I find them. Being on the edge of a vast range-land, the town also gave me an enduring taste for wilderness, as well as the ultimately untenable assumption that the civilized and the wild are compatible.

I was the last of thirteen children in a composite family, my father having had six previous children and my mother two. My father died when I was nine, so my mother, an intensely religious person, was the chief influence of my childhood. I felt guilt and grief over leaving her alone when I went away to college a regret from which I suffer even now. I interrupted my studies to serve a French-speaking mission in Switzerland and Belgium, then returned to complete a doctorate at the University of Utah in 1965, which is when I joined the faculty of Weber State University.
In 1958 I married Althea Sand, a non-Mormon. We have a daughter who lives presently in the Puget Sound area with her family. In retirement, we have followed her to the Pacific Northwest and now spend a good deal of time with our grandchildren. Although I aspired to write fiction from my earliest college years, I postponed my endeavor until I had turned forty in the 1970s. I then settled into serious writing, producing two collections of short stories, two novels, a biography, and an autobiography. I do not regret my late start. At forty, I had something to say and a better idea of how to say it. I became active on the liberal Mormon circuit, writing essays and delivering speeches aimed at liberalizing my church. Currently I serve as editor of" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought."

Levi S. Peterson is a retired professor of English at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah."