Overview

A poetic portrait of Joseph Smith's early life and career A quintessentially American saga, the life of Joseph Smith offers believers and non-believers alike an epic narrative that inhabits both grounded history and a heavenly sphere of action. Zachary McLeod Hutchins renders Smith's early life as a poetic narrative in two parts. The first introduces a very human Joseph and his youthful encounter with demonic powers seeking to prevent any communication with heaven. Following his First Vision, the teenaged prophet is charged by the angel Moroni to retrieve and translate a sacred record inscribed on gold plates. The second part picks up the story four years later, as Joseph marries Emma Hale and undertakes the plates' translation. Hutchins supplies a fictionalized excerpt from that translation, The Book of Lehi, and details Joseph's efforts to organize his growing band of followers, concluding on a note of contentment at odds with the tumultuous times to come in Smith's final years. An innovative perspective on Smith's early exploits, Joseph: An Epic reinterprets the origin story of a religious seeker and the faith he created.

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9780252046902

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Reviews

""Joseph is a modern miracle. It delights us with echoes of Dante and Milton, and it captivates us with its serious, and seriously epic treatment of Joseph Smith and the Restoration. Zachary Hutchins has written the best long poem about Latter-day Saint origins that the world has ever seen."" --Michael Austin, author of The Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads, and Rereads, the Bible

Author Information

Zachary McLeod Hutchins is a professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative and Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England.

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