For many young LDS academics, Wayne C. Booth was always the flag bearer. He was to LDS literary scholarship what Steve Young was to football and the Osmonds to entertainment. He wore a badge of credibility. He showed you could get there from here. And he attracted the best and the brightest.
Last week, Booth passed away at age 84 in Illinois. At the University of Chicago, where he served on the faculty for more than 40 years, his legacy as a literary lion will likely grow. The New York Times recently called Booth "one of the pre-eminent literary critics of the second half of the 20th century."
Born in American Fork and educated at BYU, Booth saw duty as both a soldier and an LDS missionary. He studied chemistry as a boy but eventually found his way into letters. Yet even as he drifted away from the LDS Church, he maintained a love for Utah, the religion and his Utah friends, an affection that was generously returned. Upon the passing of Booth, Richard H. Cracroft — former dean of the college of Humanities at BYU — eulogized him as "a brilliant star in Utah's panoply."
"The state of Utah has lost a distinguished native son and BYU one of its most internationally renowned alumni," said Cracroft. "He wrote 16 books, including the prize-winning 'The Rhetoric of Fiction,' 'The Rhetoric of Irony' and 'The Company We Keep' — all standard works of literary criticism and required reading in literature departments around the world."
Wallace Stegner said Booth's work "shows signs of replacing all the standard discussions of the art of fiction." The Yale Review declared "The Rhetoric of Fiction" one of the seminal works of our time.
Cracroft describes Booth as "witty, warm and wise." Others have offered similar sentiments. He lived up to such a billing in a question-and-answer session at BYU during the 1990s. There, he blended warmth and light in his inimitable way.
"There is a destructive tendency in every culture to assume that all art has to be in a common mold and that if some people don't like it, then it's bad; if it's not for everybody, then you've got to worry," Booth said. "But in the relatively homogeneous Mormon culture there is a tremendous variety of things going on. Why can't we have a culture in which there are lots of experiments?"
The notion — as with most of the man's notions — was spoken through a smile.