After Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, the young Mormon Church faced chaos, betrayal, and the question of who would lead next.

In 2012, scholar John Turner published an award-winning biography of Brigham Young, a mountain of a man in Western Americana. But there remained a bigger fish to pursue, namely Joseph Smith, the ...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has commissioned a new official biography of its 19th-century charismatic founder, to be titled simply: “Joseph the Prophet.” The new volume about ...

The founder of the Mormon Church rocked 19th-century America with his spiritual visions, his belief in polygamy—and even a presidential run. Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder and leader of the Church of ...

Perhaps a true-to-life biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, can never be written. Smith’s claims to accessing the divine were too outlandish, his embrace of polygamy too ...

A granite obelisk rises 38.5 feet above the dark green woods of Sharon, a small town on the White River in Vermont. Each foot represents a year in the life of Joseph Smith Jr., the progenitor, prophet ...