transition. Mormon history weighs heavily on the Mormon writer, but it is a "usable past," albeit foreshortened because history for the Latter-day Saints begins not at Sumer (to echo the archaeologists) but at Cumorah. Joseph Smith's restorationist theology collapsed the centuries and repaired Christianity's broken circuitry with his doctrine of dispensations, putting the primitive church on line with his own. That leapfrogging, though it attempts a return to the fountains, constitutes a great aesthetic loss, officially denying latter-day believers communion with all those saints and martyrs of the intervening generations and, again officially, depriving Mormon writers of a motherlode of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation lore and legend and literary and historical allusion which could enrich their own work. (It does, of course, in the work of independentwriters, but not in the official literature.) Joseph Smith's church, like America itself, was starting over. Repudiating Europe was a national obsession (think only of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar") and the Prophet went the political and literary patriots one betterin the Book of Mormon he gave the country its primordial migration story, an ancient history, and declared the New World to be in fact the site of the Old Eden. Consider for a moment the scale and audacity of Mormonism's initial claims and undertakings with all that these promise for the creative writer:

The beards on New York farmers' jaws
Grew too heavy for small laws
A Moses or an Abraham
Felt that nations in him swam. (Coffin 3)

We get an early inkling of the excitement Mormonism was to create