BYU

Harold B. Lee Library

Hooligan: A Mormon Boyhood

A memoir by Douglas Thayer

  • Time: 3:00 PM
  • Date: Thursday, April 03, 2008
  • Place: DeLamar Jensen Lecture Room, 1130 HBLL, BYU


About the Event

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections is proud to announce this year’s 2nd annual Provo Founder’s Day Lecturer, noted Utah author and BYU professor Douglas Thayer. Thayer’s presentation will be a reading and an informal lecture, based on his publication, Hooligan: A Mormon Boyhood, (Zarahemla Books, 2007) which is a memoir of the author’s childhood years growing up in West Provo.

Please join us, if you were “born and raised” in Provo, or simply interested in the city that has hosted Brigham Young University since 1875. Thayer’s book is uniquely about Provo; however, the Utah landscape (both town and county), his experiences, and the individuals he so fondly describes, could be part of “any Utah city,” or for that matter, any city in the Intermountain West, through the Great Depression and the Post World War II years of the Mid-twentieth century. Regarding Thayer and this book, Orson Scott Card has declared “One of the finest writers the LDS Church has yet produced has now turned his talent to his own growing-up years. Entertaining, wise—and it’s even true.”

Elouise Bell, author of Only When I Laugh and Madame Ridiculous and Lady Sublime has written: Known in some circles as a Mormon Hemingway, Thayer has created a richly detailed work that shares cultural DNA with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. His narrative at once prosaic and poetic, Thayer captures nostalgia for a simpler time, along with boyhood’s universal yearnings, pleasures, and mysteries

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