Stephen C. LeSueur. January 6, 1952 – July 1, 2025 July 22 2025
An editor's dream is a solid manuscript with flowing prose and in need of only a copy edit. Stephen C. LeSueur fulfilled my dreams not only once, but twice. Entering the Mormon Studies scene with his award-winning 1987 study, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, which was one of the first major works to highlight the complicated and often mutually violent conflicts between Mormons and their Missouri neighbors, Steve returned in 2023 with another exploration of violence involving a Mormon community, but this time something a little more personal.
Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier: The Murders of Frank LeSueur and Gus Gibbons by the Wild Bunch is one of the most captivating books on Mormon history that I have worked on (or even read). At its face value, it's Wild West history investigating the murders of Steve's ancestors by members of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch and what followed. However, it is much more than that. Although Steve was no longer a believing Latter-day Saint, Life and Death is a powerful, sympathetic, and insightful study on the faith that led Mormon settlers to establish a community in the barren desert of Arizona and how that same faith informed their response to this violence—even contributing to the eventual building of the Mesa Arizona Temple.
Then, about a year ago, Steve reached out to me to ask if we would be interested in following that up with a novel he had recently finished. While I very much liked the idea of working with him again, a large novel was outside of what we normally do, and so I initially pointed him to other publishers that might be a better fit. (We have published a pair of graphic novels and some news editions of nineteenth-century dime novels, but those were more Mormon studies related.) Unfortunately, within a few months after this, Steve informed me that his cancer had returned. To be honest, because I had so much valued my previous experience working with him and knew that his writing wouldn't require too much labor on our end, I chose to take on the novel as a favor to make sure that it would be out in time for him to see it in print—on condition that the manuscript (which I had yet to read) didn't have anything objectionable.
Once I began reading, I couldn't put it down. I finished the 300+ page manuscript in less than two days and knew that we had to publish it. In a melding of Richard Dutcher's God's Army and Levi Peterson's The Backslider, Every Man a Prophet takes place in the Norwegian Mission in the 1970s and is informed by Steve's own time serving there as a young elder, but the foundational missionary experience he captures felt like it could have come out of the much warmer and later experiences I had in Hawaii at the turn of the millennium. (Apparently the Mormon missionary experience transcends both time and space.) Mirroring the Steve I had come to know and just like his previous book with us, Every Man a Prophet is brilliantly smart, compassionate, sympathetic, and brimming with love for the religious community he knew well. Thankfully, because of Steve's talents as a writer, we were able to push his manuscript through with record speed, and I am happy to know that he was able to hold finished copies in his hand and even sign a dozen of them.
A few weeks ago, the Man Upstairs (aka Greg Kofford) told me that he we needed to find out how to get Every Man in more hands because he thought it could change lives for the better. I couldn't agree more.
The world would be a better and kinder place with more people like Stephen C. LeSueur in it, and sadly there is now one less.
Loyd Isao Ericson
Managing Editor