Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

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Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling is a biography of Joseph Smith Jr., founder and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Richard Bushman, both a practicing Latter-day Saint (Mormon) and Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University. The title of the book refers to a self-description by Smith, "I [am] a rough stone. The sound of the hammer and chisel was never heard on me nor never will be. I desire the learning and wisdom of heaven alone," repeated by Brigham Young. Bushman is the author of many books on early American cultural and religious history, and his background enables him to locate Joseph Smith in the historical and cultural context of early nineteenth-century America, which created fertile ground for a number of new religious movements.

Although the five-hundred eighty-four page biography (with additional extensive notes and documentation) does not avoid controversial aspects of Smith's life and work, such as his practice of polygamy and his youthful treasure-seeking, it treats them cautiously, and as Bushman himself admits, with "greater tolerance for Smith's remarkable stories than most historians would allow." ^[1] Rough Stone Rolling makes use of much recent research and is the most complete biography of Joseph Smith published to date, although it lacks the literary distinction^[2] of Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History (1945), a biography that presents Smith as a gifted fraud.^[3]

In 2007, Bushman published a brief but revealing memoir about the publication of Rough Stone Rolling, which outlines both the genesis of the book and the reaction of audiences and reviewers during his yearlong book tour.^[4]

[edit] Publication data

Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) ISBN 1-4000-4270-4 (hardback)
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage Books, 2007) ISBN 978-1-4000-7753-3 (paperback)

[edit] References

^ Richard Lyman Bushman, On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary (Salt Lake City: Gregg Kofford Books, 2007), 124. Jane Lampman writing for the Christian Science Monitor notes that Bushman "sanitizes Smith's motives for establishing polygamy and marrying dozens of wives." CSM, December 17, 2005; Walter Kirn says that when reading Bushman's biography, "the reader despairs of ever finding out whether Smith was God's own spokesman or the L. Ron Hubbard of his day." New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2006, 14-15.
^ See Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books, November 17, 2005, 35-37. McMurtry says that in reading Bushman, it is difficult to determine "where biography ends and apologetics begins." In a long academic review, "Richard Lyman Bushman, the Story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, and the New Mormon History," Journal of American History, 94 (September 2007), Jan Shipps writes that "the novelist Larry McMurtry's preference for Fawn Brodie's skeptical stance helps explain his position, stated in the New York Review of Books, that No Man Knows My History is still the best biography of the prophet. But the somewhat stilted early chapters of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling probably did not pull McMurtry into Smith's astonishing story as do Brodie's introductory chapters."
^ Jan Shipps, a preeminent non-LDS scholar of Mormonism who rejects Brodie's thesis, nevertheless has called No Man Knows My History a "beautifully written biography...the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life."
^ Richard Lyman Bushman, On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary (Salt Lake City: Gregg Kofford Books, 2007).