Your book Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism(Univ. of Illinois Press) was published more than 20 years ago. Why do this continuation?
That biography in 1984 went up to 1830, and his life as a church leader was just getting started. This book absorbs the first biography and continues to 1844.
Have you made any new discoveries?
There haven't been huge documentary discoveries, but I have certainly seen his life in a different perspective for a long time. Personally, I've been impressed with his melancholy, his need to be surrounded and held up by people and activities. When he was alone, he would tend to brood. On the surface, he is so bold and dominant, almost to the point of arrogance at times, that we think he is invulnerable. But he also has this underside of unease and melancholy.
Do you expect any controversy over the book?
I do. I think he is controversial in whatever form he's presented. I present a very human Joseph Smith, as incorporated in the title phrase he uses about himself: rough stone rolling. There are still Mormons who want to see him as perfection embodied and will be surprised at his more human side. There is also a body of people who are very suspicious of anyone who claims authority from God. Smith is a perfect target, because he claimed to speak for God so definitively. And there's a third group that will criticize the biography: the large numbers of disaffected Mormons whose intention is to lessen his stature.
What's your perspective on Smith?
I admit in the book that I'm a believer, and that I'm empathetic to Joseph Smith. I position myself, though, with those who believe that you get deeper into people's minds if you try to understand the world as they did. There are some writers who try to criticize the subject. But Joseph isn't interesting as a fraud; he's interesting as a prophet. So I tell the story of how that prophetic persona developed in his own mind and in his life.
Sixty years ago, Knopf published one of the most critical biographies of Smith,Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History. Did that factor into your choice of Knopf as publisher?
I love the poetry of Knopf publishing a book that Mormons were uneasy with in 1945, and 60 years later publishing me. I also knew Jane Garrett, the editor, very well, and liked her.
What do you hope this biography will contribute to the literature on Smith?
If people know anything about Joseph Smith, they have a split image of him. He's this Jacksonian figure who comes from obscurity and achieves impossible things. They see him as a colorful fraud who is perhaps dangerous. I don't think most people see him as a religious figure. That's one thing I want to correct, by showing the strength of his religious thought.
