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The Twenty-Seventh Wife. By Irving Wallace. (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1961, 443 pp., $5.95) Although he is generally credited with only twenty-seven wives, there is evidence that Brigham Young was married to more than fifty living women. With so many wives, it might be expected that he would be continually faced with family problems. However, it appears that only one wife ever gave him any serious trouble. Two months before his 67th or 68th birthday, he married Ann Eliza Webb Dee, a 23 or 24 year old divorcee with two children. (The records and Ann Eliza's statements disagree as to the date of the marriage.) Four or five years later, she filed suit for divorce, on the grounds of neglect and cruelty. Claiming that her husband was worth millions and had a monthly income of forty thousand dollars, she asked for temporary alimony of a thousand dollars a month, twenty thousand in attorney's fees, and a final settlement of two hundred thousand. The filing of this suit placed Brigham Young in an embarrassing position, with a difficult decision to make. As head of the Mormon Church and leading exponent of the doctrine of plurality of wives, he had tried to convince his female followers that the position of a plural wife was as secure, and otherwise as desirable, as that of a lady with a husband all her own. Now one of his own wives had challenged him to make good by recognizing her as a legal wife and negotiating a
