SOURCE: "Witnesses for God," in No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, second edition, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971, pp. 67-82.

Brodie, a distinguished biographer and historian and Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at UCLA, is considered a leading authority on Mormon history. In the following excerpt from her biography of Joseph Smith, originally published in 1945, Br odie discusses the content and style of the Book of Mormon and the events surrounding its publication.

The Book of Mormon was a mutation in the evolution of American literature, a curious sport, at once sterile and potent. Although it bred no imitators outside Mormonism and was ignored by literary critics, it brought several hundred thousand immigrants to America in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century sees the distribution of thousands of copies each year. For more than a hundred years missionaries have heralded...