Item Detail
-
7951
-
Journal Article
-
English
-
Cracroft, Richard H.
-
The Gentle Blasphemer : Mark Twain, Holy Scripture, and the Book of Mormon
-
BYU Studies
-
Winter 1971
-
11
-
1971
-
119-40
-
"Chapter Sixteen of Mark Twain's Roughing It begins, "All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the 'elect' have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it." Conversely, all Mormons have heard of Twain's caustic burlesque on the Book of Mormon, but none seems to have taken the trouble to demonstrate to Gentiles that Twain was obviously one of the multitude who had not read the book. Indeed, the four chapters in Roughing It (1872) devoted to the Mormons and their "golden Bible" continue to evoke hilarity from Latter-day Saints, not only because of the burlesque on sacred Mormon institutions, of which Twain was understandably but appallingly ignorant, but also because of the amusingly evident fact that if Twain read the Book of Mormon at all, it was in the same manner that Tom Sawyer won the Sunday School Bible contest--by cheating." [Publisher's abstract]
-
10
-
"The Assault of Laughter" : The Comic Attack On Mormon Polygamy in Popular Literature
Arno Schmidt among Comic Commentators on the Book of Mormon
Beyond "Surreptitious Staring" : Migration, Missions, and the Generativity of Mormonism for the Comparative and Translocative Study of Religion
Distorting Polygamy for Fun and Profit : Artemus Ward and Mark Twain among the Mormons
Doing the Works of Abraham : Mormon Polygamy―Its Origin, Practice, and Demise
Game Theory, The Prisoner's Dilemma, and the Book of Mormon
Joseph Smith as a Jacksonian Man of Letters : His Literary Development as Evidenced in His Newspaper Writings
Stylometry and Wordprints : A Book of Mormon Reevaluation
The Brief History and Perpetually Exciting Future of Mormon Literary Studies
Understanding the Book of Mormon : A Reader's Guide