Since 1830, millions of people have read the Book of Mormon and have been convinced that Joseph Smith's account of its ancient origins is correct. Others, however, assume that the book must be a fraud. The Book of Mormon describes peoples, cultures, history, and lands largely unknown to the nineteenth-century world. But today we enjoy a relative wealth of information about those times and peoples, providing a background against which the Book of Mormon's claims of ancient origin can be tested. This volume brings together a collection of initial efforts to mount such tests. This FARMS Reprint Edition of Book of Mormon Authorship makes available to a new generation of Book of Mormon students nine diverse essays that were very important when first published in 1982 and remain important today, to accompany a new collection of studies on the same general issue of authorship soon to be published by FARMS. These older essays have not been outdated or refuted by subsequent studies. The evidence and conclusions they put forward are just as persuasive today as when they were first published. It is this lasting quality that justifies this reprinting.