Biography of richard s van wagoner ok
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Review
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Title: Natural Born Seer : Joseph Smith, American prophet. 1805-1830
Author: Richard S. Van Wagoner
Publisher: Salt Lake City : Smith-Pettit Foundation
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2016
Number of pages: xx, 589
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN10: n/a
ISBN13: 978-1-56085-263-6
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
This book is a wonderful resource for studying the early life of Joseph Smith, Jr. It introduced me to many sources for the history of the Restoration, among them a series of eight letters from Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, published in *Latter Day Saints Messenger and Advocate* from October, 1834 through October, 1835 at Kirtland, Ohio. Cowdrey was editor of the *Messenger and Advocate* at the time, as stated in its pages. According to Van Wagoner’s bibliography (p. 513), four of the letters were later reprinted in *Times and Seasons* in 1840-41, in Nauvoo, Illinois. Van Wagoner introduces these letters as an alternative to Smith’s early histories, and it predates all but the first of them, the 1832 history. He doesn’t indicate an alternative source for the letters, which he often does, so I don’t know whether he knew that the letters are available in both HTML transcription and as PDF s
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Prior to his untimely death, Richard S. Van Wagoner was a prolific and respected amateur historian of the LDS faith. Besides an excellent biography of Sidney Rigdon, he also authored a well-received history of Mormon polygamy. It was therefore justified when the Smith-Pettit Foundation tapped him to write the first of a three-part biography of Joseph Smith. Though the entire series never appeared as the originally-conceived trilogy, two of the volumes appeared last year. Martha Bradley-Evans authored the Nauvoo-era biography, which I reviewed here. And now Van Wagoner’s volume, Natural Born Seer: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1805-1830, which covers the Prophet’s first 25 years, is also available for perusal. This is a meticulously researched, thoroughly argued, and and impressively written resource for scholars of Early Mormonism, and a helpful repository of scholarship from the New Mormon History era.
Natural Born Seer, due to its purpose and scope, shares many of the strengths of Bradley-Evans’s sister volume. The length and depth allows the author to dig into issue and events in ways that are typically glanced over in broader volumes. But the occasional reliance on problematic sources, including Lucy Mack Smith’s memoirs and, to a lesser degr
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Mormonism Research Ministry
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