The faithful story, even if true, is rather fantastical, and early tellings provoked derision, as well as a search for more naturalistic explanations. At first the Book of Mormon was dismissed as an obvious fraud related to Smith’s earlier money-digging activities, but because it was a substantial piece of work, filled with multiple characters and coherent narrative episodes, some suspected that it might have been beyond the abilities of Smith himself, who had only a few years of formal schooling. Eber D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834) popularized a theory that the Book of Mormon had been plagiarized from an unpublished novel written two decades earlier by Solomon Spalding, a local shopkeeper who had graduated from Dartmouth. In addition, Howe posited a secret collaboration between Smith and Sidney Rigdon, a Baptist preacher who had joined the LDS Church in Ohio in November 1830. This became the prevalent non-Mormon theory of the book’s origins for over half a century. However, when Spalding’s manuscript reappeared in 1884, it bore little resemblance to Smith’s scripture. After Fawn Brodie’s influential biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History (1945), most non-Mormon scholars have viewed the Book of Mormon as Smith’s own composition, in which he drew on popular ideas about Indian origins of the sort found in Ethan Smith’s (no relation) View of the Hebrews (1823), precedents of modern histories written in biblical style such as Gilbert Hunt’s The Late War (1816), revivalist preaching that Smith would have heard regularly (his family was religious but unchurched), his own study of the Bible, and his personal experiences, concerns, and family dynamics, all filtered through his remarkable imagination and storytelling abilities.