Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844) was born in Sharon, Vermont, to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, in a family of eleven children, of whom nine survived to adulthood. The family moved several times in search of land and work, eventually settling in Manchester Township, near Palmyra, New York, in 1816, after a series of crop failures and economic setbacks. Smith attended school irregularly; he was literate but not formally educated beyond basic primary level. His surviving writing shows the linguistic marks of a rural upstate New York upbringing with strong exposure to the King James Bible but limited access to higher education. Smith's adolescence was marked by frontier religious enthusiasm. The 1816-1824 period produced what historians call 'the Palmyra revival' — a series of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian revivals in the region that produced converts from many Christian denominations. Smith's First Vision (1820, not publicly reported in detail until 1832-1838) reports a theophany in which God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him and instructed him to join no existing church. This account established the distinctive LDS theological position that all existing Christian churches had apostatized. In 1823 Smith reported the first angelic visit from Moroni, leading to annual returns to the Hill Cumorah through 1827, when he retrieved the golden plates. He was 21 years old when the translation work began. The translation process, Smith's marriage to Emma Hale (January 1827), the birth and loss of the 116-page Book of Lehi manuscript (summer 1828), the collaboration with Oliver Cowdery as scribe (April 1829), and the May 1829 Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthood restorations formed an intense three-year period of foundational religious activity. The Book of Mormon was published March 26, 1830, when Smith was 24; the Church of Christ was organized April 6, 1830. Smith's subsequent career was extraordinarily consequential. He led the church from New York to Ohio (1831), Missouri (1838), Illinois (1839), received over 130 formal revelations (canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants), supervised the construction of the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples, practiced plural marriage (privately from 1831, formally revealed 1843), and was murdered by a mob at Carthage Jail, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, age 38. The movement he founded split into multiple branches after his death; the largest (LDS Church under Brigham Young) migrated to Utah; the second-largest (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now Community of Christ) was led by Smith's son Joseph III and rejected plural marriage and several other Utah-era doctrines. Accounts of Smith's character vary dramatically. LDS tradition remembers him as a sincere, charismatic, prophetically gifted leader whose revelations founded the Restoration. Contemporary non-Mormon accounts (many hostile, reflecting the period's sectarian competition and nineteenth-century anti-Mormon polemics) describe him variously as a religious fraud, a sincere visionary with limited formal education, a community builder, or a sexually exploitative leader (particularly regarding plural marriage, which included some polyandrous relationships). Fawn Brodie's 1945 biography No Man Knows My History synthesized a critical view; Richard Bushman's 2005 Rough Stone Rolling is the leading sympathetic academic biography. Dan Vogel's 2004 Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet offers a psychobiographical critical account.

How the Era Shapes the Book

The Book of Mormon is a Second Great Awakening text. The broader religious-cultural atmosphere of upstate New York in the 1810s-20s produced dozens of competing religious movements: the Disciples of Christ (Stone-Campbell movement, from 1820s), the Shakers (Mother Ann Lee's communities, with the Watervliet NY community just east of Palmyra), Adventism (William Miller's Second Coming predictions, primarily in western New York and Vermont), the Oneida Community (John Humphrey Noyes's 1848 commune in central NY with earlier Vermont origins), and dozens of smaller sectarian movements. Several motifs in the Book of Mormon reflect shared preoccupations of Second Great Awakening religion: the expectation that true Christianity has been corrupted and must be restored; the urgency of the Second Coming; the authority of new revelation; the identification of the United States as providentially significant; the role of Native Americans in prophetic history. Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (1823) was a representative Second Great Awakening work arguing Native Americans were Israelite descendants, a thesis the Book of Mormon developed at length. The book also reflects the era's distinctive American religious anxieties. The 'Great Apostasy' theme addresses the perceived spiritual failure of all existing denominations — a judgment many nineteenth-century Americans shared as they observed sectarian competition, theological argument, and financial scandals among established churches. The 'Restoration' theme offered a solution: a restored primitive Christianity, with apostles and prophets, direct revelation, and authentic authority. This restorationist impulse was shared with the Disciples of Christ (Stone-Campbell), the Shakers, the Adventists, and other movements of the era. The Book of Mormon's distinctive contribution was to combine restorationism with a new scripture purporting to recover ancient history — rather than merely reforming practice on the basis of existing Christian scripture.