Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Richard Lyman Bushman is a historian and a practicing Latter-day Saint, and this biography, published by Alfred A. Knopf, is widely regarded as the standard academic life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, drawing on extensive primary documentary research including sources not always used by earlier, more devotional or more hostile biographies. Its strength is that Bushman writes with both a historian's critical method and firsthand familiarity with LDS religious culture, addressing difficult or contested episodes in Smith's life directly rather than either avoiding or sensationalizing them. Its limit is that Bushman's own faith background is itself a documented interpretive lens some other historians have noted, so a reader weighing a specific contested episode benefits from being aware of that context alongside the book's genuine scholarly rigor.