Angel in the Forest

Marguerite Young (1908-1995), born and reared in Indiana, moved to New York City in the 1940s, where she lived for the rest of her life. She is the author of two books of poetry, a collection of essays entitled Inviting the Muses, and two novels, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (also a Dalkey Archive Essential) and Harp Song for a Radical.

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2024“Young’s fables of communal enchantment and disenchantment rhyme with the struggles of the contemporary left to articulate a sufficiently ambitious program of transformation. This is especially true of her most elegant tragicomedy of political imagination, Angel in the Forest, a history of the rise and fall of the two dreaming collectives of New Harmony.”—Bookforum“When a poet chooses to write history facts gain in power and in dimension. Young is a meticulous scholar, but she illumines every description and every character with her laser light of significance. Her facts radiate wit and irony and are incarnated in human beings.” —Anaïs Nin, Los Angeles Times”One of my very treasured books . . . the best book I know on the subject of the early primitive religious cults. I hope it will get the attention it deserves.” —Katherine Anne Porter“Religious or secular, Young convincingly, brilliantly, and beautifully shows that the only winners in utopia-building are those selling the goods.”—Heavy Feather Review

• ContentsNew Harmony Today—A Glimpse in Summer, 1940Backward into Old Harmony—A Dissolving VistaThe Children of the Ozarks, 1940The Children of IsraelA Journey to the WabashA Machine Like ClockworkA City Whose Ten Gates Are of GoldFrederick Rapp, the Lord TemporalThe Exodus of the Rappites from HarmonyThe Coming of OneThe Fading of the Golden RoseAnother Coming, Another DispensationA Pilgrim's ProgressDearest CarolineAn Eden of ChildrenParadise Was LostJehovah and RousseauInterviews with Emperors and KingsNew Harmony, the Goal of ManAmerica, the Promised LandThe Pears FamilyThe Fool of NatureNoah's Ark, the Maid of Mist, the Boatload of KnowledgeNew Harmony, the Golden RoseAn Adult ViewSerpents in the GardenThe Declaration of Mental IndependenceExodus from New HarmonyGlaucas, 1940The Third Age of New HarmonyRobert Owen's Ideal Made Real to Dwell Among UsBuilder of Old HarmonyUtopia in BedlamFarewell to New Harmony