Biography
William Grant Bagley was born to Lawrence Miles Bagley and Margene Bailey Bagley on May 27, 1950 in Salt Lake City. From the age of nine he was raised in Oceanside, California, where his father was a long-serving mayor in the 1980s. His younger brother Pat Bagley became the notable Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist and they are the uncles of professional surfer Dusty Payne. Bagley attended Brigham Young University in 1967-68, and then he transferred to University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he obtained his B.A. in History in 1971. At Santa Cruz Bagley studied writing with Page Stegner and history with John Dizikes. He graduated from UCSC between Richard White and Patty Limerick, two of the leading lights of the "New Western History." While at UCSC he received the California State Scholar and President’s Scholar awards. He considers an integral part of his education a trip he took in 1969, on a homemade raft built of framing lumber and barrels, down the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to New Orleans. After graduation he spent three years in North Carolina studying the local Bluegrass music and culture, and playing in bands.
After college, Bagley worked as a laborer, carpenter, cabinet maker, and country musician for more than a decade. In 1979 he founded Groundhog Records to release his long playing record, "The Legend of Jesse James." In 1982 he abandoned music and hard labor to take a writing position at Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics firm. He worked in various high-tech ventures until 1995, when he started his career as a professional historian. He has written more than twenty books, and in 2008 historian David Roberts dubbed him the "sharpest of all thorns in the side of the Mormon historical establishment."
Although he was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon or LDS Church), Bagley is no longer a member. He has publicly stated that he "never believed the theology since was old enough to think about it." However, he is friends with believers and considers himself a "heritage Mormon," valuing his pioneer lineage.
Bagley works and lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Read more about this topic: Will Bagley
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)