Smith, Jr., Joseph | I. Woodbridge Riley (essay date 1902)
I. Woodbridge Riley (essay date 1902)
SOURCE: "The Author's Mentality," in The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr., Dodd, Mead & Company, 1902, pp. 141-73.
[In the following excerpt, Riley presents a psychological sketch of Joseph Smith based on his writings in the Book of Mormon, a work Riley suggests is more useful when regarded as biographical rather than historical or literary.]
Without further quotation or digression, it remains to get at a psychological estimate of the Book of Mormon. As literature it is not worth reading,—the educated Mormons fight shy of it; as history it merely casts a side light on a frontier settlement in the twenties; but as biography it has value, it gives, as it were, a cross section of the author's brain. The subject may be most inclusively studied from the standpoint of the constructive imagination, its materials and range, its phases aesthetic and...
[The entire page is 1996 words long]
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