The King Follett Sermon: A Biography

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.\n—Matthew Bowman, President of the Mormon History Association