Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance: An Update

This is a follow-up to my article, "Joseph Smith and the American Renaissance," published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2002. My purpose in writing that article was to consider Joseph Smith in relation to his more illustrious contemporary American authors -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In that article I tried to demonstrate that in comparison with these writers, Joseph Smith did not possess the literary imag...