William Smith gives us the complex and controversial biography of Joseph Smith’s most famous sermon, guiding us through a bramble of textual sources, disavowals, obscurity, and reappraisals. Along the way, Smith gives us a window into the always changing and sometimes unspoken ideas and assumptions that undergird the foundation of Latter-day Saint ideas, doctrine, and practice.
—John G. Turner, author of The Mormon Jesus: A Biography
William V. Smith has produced a monumental biography of Joseph Smith Jr.’s greatest public discourse, the King Follett Sermon. This book seamlessly combines fine-grained textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history. Although in one sense a foundation stone of Latter-day Saint thought, Smith demonstrates that the sermon has more often than not proven to be a stumbling block for those wrestling with the Smith Jr.’s variegated theological legacies.
—David W. Grua, The Joseph Smith Papers
In this volume, Smith offers us the most exhaustive and useful textual and reception history of the King Follett Discourse we have. The most important sermon in the broad sweep of the Mormon tradition, the discourse has deserved this treatment for quite some time. The book is worth a read for the careful parsing of the sermon's textual history alone. But Smith's able command of not only the complicated genealogies of the various versions of the sermon, but also of the intellectual history of the LDS church and the religious atmosphere in which it found itself, means that he is able to think through the sermon's rising and falling fortunes in a way that will be useful to scholars of the LDS church but also American religion more generally.
—Matthew Bowman, president of the Mormon History Association
A wonderful deep dive into Joseph Smith's most powerful, most controversial, and most important sermon. William Victor Smith not only helps us to understand the mysterious text but leads us carefully through the next 200 years of reception. This is a one-of-a-kind book and a must read for students of the Latter-day Saint tradition.
—Christopher Blythe, author of Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse
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