The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith

Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1980. First Edition. 447pp. Octavo [23 cm] Black cloth with the title gilt stamped on the front board and backstrip. Near fine/Near fine. Foreword by Truman F. Madsen. This volume presents for the first time the original accounts of all Joseph Smith's public discourses given during the Nauvoo period. This includes records of previously unpublished sermons, contemporaneous reports not available when the Church historians finished their official reports of the discourses, and the originals of those used in the published accounts. The criterion for inclusion of a source in this work was whether that source was a contemporaneous record of a public discourse.

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844) was born in Sharon, Vermont. In 1820 he received a heavenly visitation of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. In 1830, Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ. After being driven from three different states and suffering much persecution, Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum Smith (1800-1844), were murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1844.