J. Golden Kimball

He stood six-foot-three and looked, by his own admission, "almost transparent" - a lanky, sandy-haired cowboy-turned-preacher who could silence ten thousand people in the Tabernacle and make them laugh doing it. J. Golden Kimball drove freight teams and logged timber in his youth, then spent decades as a member of the First Council of the Seventy, one of the most beloved and quoted General Authorities of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He was, as one admirer put it, "the Mark Twain of Mormonism" - a man who preached hard truths in a high, unhurried drawl, peppered his sermons with mild profanity that scandalized some and disarmed everyone else, and never claimed to be better than he was. "I am a man of weakness," he told his congregations, "I am a man full of faults; but God knows I have given Him the best effort there was in me."

First published in 1934, this classic biography traces Kimball's path from a hardscrabble pioneer boyhood in Bear Lake Valley to the Tabernacle pulpit, and gathers, in his own words, the sayings, sermons, and stories that made him one of the most original and enduring characters in Latter-day Saint history. Equal parts biography and treasury of frontier wit, it's a portrait of a man who was, in the words of those who knew him, "the original product" - and when Providence had finished him, "the pattern was lost and never found again."