Mormon Artists Group

Mormon Artists Group Press announces the publication of

On the Road with Joseph Smith
An Author’s Diary

by Richard Lyman Bushman

Imagine: A historian spends decades thinking about a man. He researches his life. He writes a manuscript over a period of many years that is accepted by America’s premier publisher. The appearance of the book is practically guaranteed to polarize readers and critics, not because of the quality of the writing and its research, but because of its controversial subject, Joseph Smith, Jr.

What is it like for one of America’s celebrated cultural historians to write a book that opens himself to scorn in part because he states on the first page of the preface that he is a religious man and a believer in his subject? Will critics dismiss the biography out of hand, will believers find its frankness too hard to take, will any reader be satisfied? Will anyone read it at all?

On the Road with Joseph Smith is Richard Lyman Bushman’s private account of the events surrounding the publication of his great work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). It includes his personal thoughts and his correspondence with critics, believers, readers, friends, detractors, colleagues, and the media. The chronicle begins the day the manuscript is delivered to his editor in New York City. It follows the author who criss-crosses the country taking his act on the road, as it were, as he speaks to historical conferences, religious gatherings, book signing events, lectures, and interviews over the course of a year. The volume includes the communications between the author and readers who are struggling to understand the complex issues revealed in the biography. Most pervasive are the author’s anxieties about the reception of the book and what those reactions mean to him.

To some extent, the emotional journey of On the Road with Joseph Smith is like any artist’s experience as he or she creates something new and presents it to the world. In this case, however, the stakes seem higher. The resulting diary is a candid, thorough, revealing, and emotional behind-the-scenes examination of the power of the written word from an author who thinks deeply and writes eloquently. It concerns integrity, honesty, fame, money, guarded expectations, reputation, criticism, and self-doubt. Above all, it is a compassionate book that reveals a man standing at the edge of the unknown with much to gain or lose and only his faith and skills to sustain him.

Excerpts from On the Road with Joseph Smith

August 9, 2005 [In response to a Presbyterian critic’s query about believing scholarship]

I wish I could strike a responsive chord in Christians like you. We wonder why all Christians don’t understand that we believe in the Book of Mormon on the basis of a spiritual witness. It is very hard for a Mormon to believe that Christians accept the Bible because of the scholarly evidence confirming the historical accuracy of the work. Surely there are uneducated believers whose convictions are not rooted in academic knowledge. Isn’t there some kind of human, existential truth that resonates with one’s desires for goodness and divinity? And isn’t that ultimately why we read the Bible as a devotional work? We don’t have to read the latest issues of the journals to find out if the book is still true. We stick with it because we find God in its pages or inspiration, or comfort, or scope. That is what religion is about in my opinion, and it is why I believe the Book of Mormon. I can’t really evaluate all the scholarship all the time; while I am waiting for it to settle out I have to go on living. I need some good to hold on to and to lift me up day by day. The Book of Mormon inspires me, and so I hold on. Reason is too frail to base a life on. You can be whipped about by all the authorities with no genuine basis for deciding for yourself. I think it is far better to go where goodness lies.

I keep thinking other Christians are in a similar position but they don’t agree. They keep insisting their beliefs are based on reason and evidence. I can’t buy that—the resurrection as rational fact? And so I am frankly as perplexed about Christian belief as you are about Mormons. Educated Christians claim to base their belief on reason when I thought faith was the teaching of the scriptures. You hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, and you follow it.

I guess we could go on and on. I hope I am telling you the truth about myself. The fact is I am a believer and I can’t help myself. I couldn’t possibly give it up; it is too delicious.

September 24, 2005

Knopf mailed me a short review from Booklist. Basically favorable. I realize I don’t like to read any kind of review, even the favorable ones. I am annoyed by what the reviewers choose to emphasize in Joseph’s life. Most of them pick up some fragments of his life and present those as if they were the key elements. There is something so cavalier about the implicit assertion that they have delivered the essence of the man. Right now I await the end of the review season. All these little tempests in a teapot. In the long run, the book will make its own way whatever the reviewers say. I would like to have all that behind me.

October 6, 2005

I am sitting in the Whitney and Roger Johnson’s family room in Southboro, Massachusetts, after dinner and a fireside at their house last night. I told them about how I came to write the book and my empathetic approach. My question was can a book about Joseph Smith written by a Mormon be useful to non-Mormons. I thought of course it could until George Marsden said this is a biography for Mormons only, a theme repeated at the John Whitmer panel last week. Too sympathetic, bordering on the apologetic, I guess they have concluded. In my heart of hearts I say to myself you don’t like it because you don’t like Joseph Smith. You want him to be an impostor and a scoundrel, and when I make him something more, you conclude I am an apologist. The reverse side of my book not being helpful to others is that books about Joseph Smith by non-members are not useful to Mormons. We must divide the scholarship sharply in two. After the discussion last night Clayton Christiansen asked if Mormons suffer from greater prejudice in their scholarship than others. What about books on Luther by Lutherans or on Christ by Christians? Is their work considered too partisan for anyone else? It was a question I could not answer. I secretly suspect Clayton is right. Joseph Smith is simply too far off the map for serious consideration. Anyone who tries to bring him back on the map must be a partisan.

November 30, 2005

For the past week I have suffered from bouts of depression interspersed with a strange lassitude. I have been unable to buckle down to my list of tasks. This and that have distracted me—checking the stock market, reading an article in the New Yorker, calculating my finances. For days very little got done though I sat at my desk the usual number of hours. Is this post-partum depression? Today as I am slowly recovering, I think it may have been. I felt no great relief in finishing up my round of travels. I don’t think much about the book, though I do have a vague uneasiness about the negative responses that have surfaced. It is not as if I were fixated on the volume. Yet I have been discombobulated, unable to pull myself together. Even my famous mantra––today I will be a follower of Jesus Christ––has had little effect. Nothing has been in focus.

December 30, 2005

[A letter in response to a college student whose doubts about the prophet weigh heavily on him]

Dear Brother:

I fear I have little to offer by way explaining polyandry. It remains a puzzle. All I know is that Joseph Smith was preoccupied with sealing—not just husbands to wives, but childrens to parents, and one generation to another. He wanted to lock people into relationships—not necessarily sentimental relationships but ones of mutual obligation and cooperation. Our preoccupation with romance blocks us, I think, from understanding what he was getting at. I am sure he had affection for his wives, but marriage as a culmination of a powerful attraction was not his point. He saw marriage as the formation of a relationship that would in some way make people responsible to one another. All of this was connected in turn with raising up a people. Another element is his concern for lineage—that priesthood comes down by lineage. Forming the right kinds of line or being linked to the right lines facilitates that transmission.

None of this is satisfactory for us, but I hope that you don’t make it a matter of belief or unbelief, but of inquiry. There is something more here to be discovered. Was Joseph pointing toward something we would benefit from knowing? In that latter part of your letter you seem to be moving in that direction––speculating on the possibilities. I hope you write these things down. One good way to begin is to write out the problem in its most acute form. What precisely bothers you about Fannie Alger and the later polyandry? What is so wrong about these relationships? Then work your way back from there. Speculate on how Joseph might have answered your criticisms. What did they look like from his point of view?

All the best, Richard Bushman

February 6, 2006

The book seems to be cutting its own path now just as hoped. I hear of people moved by it; others read it twice to get all the stuff straight. This tells me that people are adjusting their own images of the Prophet to take all the new material into account. I sense they are challenged but not struck down by what they learn.

Actually the whole episode is fading, like the dead gradually forgetting the living in Our Town. I am moving into other spheres. . . .

May 31, 2006

[Following a panel discussion of critics at the Mormon History Association meetings]

My purpose in writing the book, I told this audience, was to present all of Joseph Smith as far as I could grasp him. I worry about the young Latter-day Saints who learn only about the saintly Joseph and are shocked to discover his failings. The problem is that they may lose faith in the entire teaching system that brought them along. If their teachers covered up Joseph Smith’s flaws, what else are they hiding? My aim was to make the whole story of this man part of common knowledge in the Church.

I had hoped that I could persuade general readers, I told the audience, to follow me into the religious world of Joseph Smith, the way I like to follow authors into the religious world of Muhammad or George Fox. To my dismay, one of the most sympathetic possible readers, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, said in a review that this will not work. Academic readers will want a naturalistic explanation of Joseph’s revelations. These are representatives of an imperialistic reason that insists that everyone think the way they do or they cannot claim to be thinkers at all. But there are drawbacks to this kind of severe rationalism. In practice it ends up stopping inquiry. If you are persuaded that Joseph Smith was a fraud, it is almost impossible to take him seriously. Fawn Brodie found Joseph Smith faintly ridiculous. She was bemused rather than bewitched by him. Nothing he thought or did could be taken entirely seriously because it was all part of his game.

If I were to write again, I would probably emphasize my belief more than I did. I would say to readers that I can show you a Joseph Smith a non-believer will probably never see. The fact is that you have to believe in a text in order to take it seriously.

The Edition

On the Road with Joseph Smith is being published as a limited edition volume, 93 sheets, 8.5″ x 11″, printed single-sided. The presentation is exceptional: the book itself is a stack of unbound sheets of Mohawk Superfine 100 lb. text paper, printed by offset lithography, wrapped in a colored paper sleeve and inserted into a handmade cherry wood slipcase 9″ x 12″ x 1.5″. It is limited to 100 copies for sale plus five copies hor de commerce for author and publisher. All copies are signed by the author and numbered.

On the Road with Joseph Smith (limited edition) - $150 - NO LONGER AVAILABLE
On the Road with Joseph Smith (paperback) - $14.95

On the Road with Joseph Smith is our eleventh publication.