When A Little Lower than the Angels appeared in 1942, its author and recent Brigham Young University graduate Virginia Sorensen was overwhelmed by the positive national attention. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker, noted how "convincingly she] explores . . . the tragic, comic, and grotesque problems of plural marriage." Set in Nauvoo, Illinois, she tells the story of a single family, a woman and her Mormon husband, loosely based on her...