Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations.

An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling also brilliantly evaluates the prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and his cultural place in the modern world.

The New York Times - Walter Kirn

Bushman's Smith, whatever else he was, comes off as a singularly brilliant motivator whose method - call it Dynamic Overextension - modern students of management would do well to study. By perpetually promising the world to a mixed bag of followers that included preachers picked off from other sects, Smith not only captured hundreds, then thousands, of minds, he harnessed their muscles, too. From New York he led his pilgrims to Ohio, only to tell them once they'd settled down that Zion lay in Missouri, much farther west, and that many of them would have to pack their things again.

Richard L. Bushman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1931. He took his B.A., M.A., and PhD. degrees at Harvard University. He has taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, University of Delaware, and Columbia University, where he is currently Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Emeritus. His previous books are From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1967), Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985), and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, and Cities (1992).