John G. Turner’s new book is a nimble account that showcases the frenzied core of Smith’s soul.

Recently we’ve seen a rise in what some scholars are calling “polygamy denial,” with some Latter-day Saints now claiming Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy, or at least not sexual polygamy.

(RNS) — ‘I think the evidence for Joseph’s polygamous sealings is pretty overwhelming,’ says historian John Turner, who has penned a new biography of Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith 1805-1844 Born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, to Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith Jr. grew up on a series of tenant farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York.

Joseph Smith's "moves to seduce other men's wives were so brazen and notorious that they led one distraught husband, Orson Pratt, to attempt suicide in Nauvoo, Illinois, on July 14, 1842." ...

In 2012, scholar John Turner published an award-winning biography of Brigham Young, a mountain of a man in Western Americana. But there remained a bigger fish to pursue, namely Joseph Smith, the ...

Perhaps a true-to-life biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, can never be written. Smith’s claims to accessing the divine were too outlandish, his embrace of polygamy too ...