On the Road with Joseph Smith

This is the third and final installment reviewing Richard Bushman's I've been slacking off my book blogging, but it's time to get back to basics. I recently acquired a copy of the paperback edition of Richard L. Bushman's On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author's Diary (Greg Kofford Books, 2007), and I plan to put up several posts as I read through it. Here are a few quotes (in italics) from the six-page Introduction, along with my comments.

I thought about a Joseph Smith biography while still in graduate school in Harvard almost fifty years ago (p. 1). I wonder how many writers, authors, or scholars ever manage to come back, toward the end of their career, to pick up the projects they dreamed of when they were grad students?

I did not engage Mormon history until the 1970s when Leonard Arrington invited me to write a book about Joseph Smith's early life as the first volume in his projected sixteen-volume history of the Church (p. 1). Which shows what an effective force Arrington was, and what a shame that his planned history series got derailed. Bushman's volume did get published separately as Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984).

I got started at the Huntington [in 1997] and worked away pretty steadily for seven years (p. 3). Well, RSR is a long book, but even for a recognized author who works with a major publishing house, it is apparent that writing a book can be a long and lonely task. Seven years. Maybe this is why authors sometimes end up throwing their manuscript in the fire.

[A] friend in New York ... suggested that I keep a running commentary on my experiences as Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling came off the press later in the fall [of 2005]. ... In July 2005, I began making diary entries about the flow of events (p. 6). The result is On the Road with Joseph Smith: an author narrating himself watching his book get published, read, and reviewed. For some reason it makes me think of the documentary Derrida (2002), another interesting reflexive project.

Comments

[Ann]

I loved this book. I enjoyed it more then RSR, which I found a bit of a slog. I loved the section of On The Road where he started talking about "the book" as a sort of independent actor: "What the book is trying to say is..." And it's just fun watching him watch his Amazon numbers. Good job funneling readers to him, Dave.

[Guy Murray]

Dave,

This is a fascinating book, with all kinds of nuggets on how Bushman was feeling in the aftermath of the book, its sales, and reviews. Look forward to your posts on it.

[Brandt]

Dave,

I loved "On the Road with Joseph Smith." Bushman does an excellent job with describing his emotions and describing how RSR really became his "child" in a sense. The most intriging part to me is reading his hesitations and reservations to the LDS community about his book.

Concerning the 7 year thing - I think it takes someone special to keep working on a manuscript after seven years, to have it almost memorized but still tinkering away at it to make it perfect - one wonders if he was divinely inspired to keep moving along with such a masterpiece