Joseph Smith and His Mormon Empire

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. First Edition. 421pp. Brown cloth with the title in red on the front board and backstrip. About very goodd/Very good. Price clipped jacket shows sunning to spine with general overall age-toning with a strip of binder's tape at the head and foot. Bookplate on the front pastedown.Uncommon in dust jacket. Biography of the Prophet Joseph Smith by an armchair researcher and hobbyist that is cartoonish in its portrayal of the founder of Mormonism. Some of the prose is really over-the-top, we're not entirely sure how Houghton Mifflin was talked into this. "From an illiterate, disreputable, vagabond youth, the most notorious member of a shiftless family, he rose to be spiritual and temporal head of a religion which numbered tens of thousands of ardent adherents." - from the jacket.

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.