For children of the ’60s (and probably ’50s and ’40s and ’30s), before Jack Weyland and Shirley Sealey and Saturday’s Warrior, “Added Upon” was the first extended Mormon fiction many of us had heard of or had access to. Everybody had a copy in the house. I read it when I was 9 — and literature like PPP’s “Dialogue” was something I heard about only when I went to BYU. “Added Upon” was, I suspect, the first really successful Mormon fiction, in the sense of its being read generation after generation, edition after edition, and being passed along from mother to daughter. While it wasn’t first chronologically, it earns its laurels for being first in other ways. I remember it fondly, even while cringing as some of its folk doctrine pops up now and then in places where it shouldn’t.

I haven’t been able to pin down what was yet, but the earliest I’ve found so far is “The Mormon Girl’s Foreboding,” which was published in the Nauvoo Neighbor in 1843. It isn’t very good.

Better is Parley P. Pratt’s “Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil” (1844), which I find quite delightful. I hope to have a critical edition of it out next year.