Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

"Yes, this is one of the definitive biographies of Joseph Smith. It’s important not just because of the content, but also because of what it represented. It had been several decades since any other serious biography of Joseph Smith. Many still point to Fawn Brody’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History , that was published way back in 1945. But a lot has changed since then. Richard Bushman’s was the first biography that was able to take advantage of access to lots of sources that had previously been restricted by the LDS Church. So it’s a prominent historian using lots of important sources, but it also marked a new age of openness. Looking at Mormon history over the previous decade, there have been lots of battles between academic historians of the Mormon tradition, and faithful Mormons. Richard Bushman was kind of a bridge figure. So his book is significant both because it is the best look at Joseph Smith and his psyche, but also because it represents an important cultural moment in Mormonism, as one of the first scholarly books that received wide recognition among the Latter-day Saint community. One of the driving questions of Bushman’s biography is ‘How did tens of thousands of people both in America and, eventually, Britain come to see Joseph Smith as a prophet?’ As a result, the book is very much a psycho-biography that’s trying to dig into the psyche of Joseph Smith and unpack how he’s able to bring the divine into the banal, and how he’s able to find sacred principles in everyday living and everyday ideas. At the heart of Richard Bushman’s argument is that Joseph Smith was able to sacralise modern day American culture in ways that were seen as quite enticing to those who saw him as a prophet."