Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias
Marguerite Young. 1945. NY: Reynal and Hitchcock, $3.

"Work of Art"
By Martin Lebowitz. Nation 160, 12 May, 1945:547.

"Marguerite Young's first prose volume is repetitive, obscure, diffuse, overwritten, tiresomely obsessed with copulation and with analogical images of flowers, insects, and birds, scornful at many points of coherence, continuity, and form; yet it is a book of astonishing subtlet and brilliance, a genuine work of art, and together with her two previous volumes of verse it should establish its author as one of the truly notable writers of her generation. Its faults are in no sense deficiencies. Miss Young, on the contrary, is prodigal of her talent, and her book suffers from her excessive absorption in its theme."

1966 Reprint of Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias
Scribner's, 331 pp. $6.95.

"To Dream with Gods or Engineers"
By Harriet Zinnes. The Nation 13 June, 1966, 721-22.

"Twenty years ago the 'intellectual eccentric' still engaged the sympathetic attention of our writers and poets. They themselves were a bit wild, dreamers, idealists, creators of fantasies spun not out of drugs and drink, but out of their dreams of society. Robert Owen, 'the father of modern socialism,' who envisioned a science of society, was then magic enough for the writer of fable. Yet in 1945 when Marguerite Young originally published her superb historical epic on two utopias, she anticipated a new American sensibility, one that was beginning to be wary, to be suspect of the dreamer. Or is it that in reading the reissue of Angel in the Forest in 1966 the reader confronts the text with an altered sensibility, one that is uncomfortable unless it encompasses irony?"

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young. 1965. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1198 pages, $10.95

"Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust?"
By Richard Ellmann. New York Herald Tribune, 12 September 1965:Book Reviews, 1&24.
This week number one on the Bestseller List, Fiction, for 15 weeks was The Source, by James A. Michener

"Marguerite Young's first novel, famously in gestation for many years, proves to be more or less than a novel. It is an anatomy not so much of melancholy as of reality. Through a dozen characters, manifested in as many hundreds of pages, Miss Young explores with single-minded passion the residual questions in all fiction , including the validity of dreams, the deception of appearances, the confusion of identities, and the multiplicity of selves that cluster in each seemingly integral being.....The effect of this style is of some vast, uninterrupted discourse, as if life were being patiently heaped and endorsed rather than hotheadedly seized and rendered up. It is an extraordinary cosmos, shorn of fixities and definites, subservient to a central theme, ultimately abstract in purport, ambitious beyond fulfillment."

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young. 1965. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1198 pages, $10.95

"The Crucial Flower"
By Marianne Hauser. Sewanee Review 75, 1967:731-34.

"Twenty years have gone by since the publication of Marguerite Young's Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. The author, already known for her poetry, revealed herself as a brilliant prose writer, a unique chronicler of her native Indiana. Now with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling she has given us her first novel: a masterful, exhilarating work of art, a saga of America, a classic.....The themes explored in Angel in the Forest--time, life, and death dreamed or real--soar through the novel and burst into an exuberant display of stars and starfish, butterflies, lutes, frogs; lost suffragette skirts, roulette wheels; other marvels....Marguerite Young employs mythology not as a fashionable device to embroider her story, but as a searchlight, directed upon the darker reaches of our ancestral memory, our soul.....It should be emphasized that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling could have been written only in America, by an American. It is a highly original creation. But it did not come out of a serile bell jar. Its roots are in the literary soil of America."

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young. London: Peter Owen. 63s.
And Desolation Angels
Jack Kerouac. Deutsch. 30s.

"Words, Words, Words..?"
By Elizabeth Harvey. The Birmingham Post, 4 June, 1966:Midland Magazine, 2.

"'Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense is rarely found'" wrote Pope protecting his statement with the qualifying rarely. Proust wrote a long book, War and Peace is a long book and no one should want them shortened. But the trend towards sheer weight in American novels is a curious phenomenon which may have reached its climax with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, containing some 700,000 words on 1,198 closely printed pages. The mental tape-recording, the 'spontaneous flow' which so much fiction is now may be responsible, or is sheer size used to impress, to bulldoze people into admiration?....Compared with Miss Young's convoluted, sprawling, feet-off-the-ground novel Kerouac's is a simple, autobiographical piece about the jittery, neurotic, drug-taking, auto-racing, poetry-chanting, Zen-squatting crew who have appeared in The Subterraneans, On the Road, Big Sur, and form part of Kerouac's remembrances written 'on the run'...."What said the night watchman to the owl," Miss Young asks suddenly, "And what said the owl?" Yes, you need a strong nerve for this book, but there are rewarding pockets of wit and fantasy and one must, guardedly, admire the author's sheer stamina in producing this curiosity of literature."

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young. Dalkey Archive Press, 1993.

Reviewed by Gregory Feeley. The Washington Post.

Review in Publishers Weekly , 5 July, 1999, 48-49.

"Edited by Charles Ruas and published posthumously (Young died in 1995), this biography of the celebrated labor leader Debs (1855-1926) is a prodigious effort--but hardly a traditional biography. It's much more concerned with the times than with the life of Debs. Thus, Debs's historical achievements--leading railway strikes, establishing the Socialist Party, running for president between 1900 and 1912, getting imprisoned for opposing U.S. entry into WWI--are virtually absent from the book. Instead, Young...painstakingly constructs a vast tapestry that periodically invokes Debs (notably his parentage, Midwestern youth and editorship of the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine) while dwelling--in exuberant prose so purple it often clots the narrative flow--on elements of his era....Written with a sense of rhapsodic mission, these teeming pages offer many informative passages, moments of poetic juxtaposition and unrestrained bursts of language, but neither a discplined portrait of Debs nor insightful historical synthesis is among its accomplishments."

Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
by Marguerite Young. Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $35.
Review in Civilization , August/September 1999, 91.
"Eulogizing Eugene" by Kai Bird.

"Young's style is nonlinear, subjective, and psychological, and as a biographer I found myself longing for a more traditional narrative. But that was not the author's purpose. Instead, drawing on her skills as a poet and novelist, Young wanted her readers to enter into Debs's head and share his utopian dream.

Young's words are hurled at the page Jackson Pollock-style, evoking images of late-19th-century America. Debs appears all over this stunning canvas--but so, too, do mini-portraits of Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Brigham Young, and a host of other seekers of utopia. It is a veritable collage of tumbling images, rich but chaotic and often unfathomable.

Young's epic Harp Song celebrates the life of an American prophet. She reminds us that, however quixotic his battles against the capitalist robber barons of the early industrial age, Debs's transcendental, Emersonian populist decency lives on, buried deep in the American psyche. If Marguerite Young were still among us, sitting in her long crimson dress with its gold-embroidered vest at a Bleecker Street cafe, smoking her Lucky Strikes, she would optimistically insist that the coming millennium will bring a better world. Perhaps."

Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
By Marguerite Young. Edited by Charles Ruas. 599 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Review in New York Times Book Review, 26 September 1999, 22.
"The Prophet of Terre Haute" by Adam Shatz.



Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
By Marguerite Young. Edited by Charles Ruas. 599 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Review in The Washington Post, 26 September 1999.
"Fanfare for an Uncommon Man" by Stephen Moore.

It is difficult to decide who is the more remarkable character in this new book: Eugene V. Debs--founder of the Socialist Party in America, five-time presidential candidate, and a legendary orator--or his biogrpaher Marguerite Young, author of the legendary novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a first-rate historian of 19th-century America, and a prose stylist of the highest order. This book is a match made in heave: the story of an extraordinary man told by an extraordinary woman.
Young's narrative method is episodic and anecdotal, and her style nothing less than epic. This is not a conventional biography but a "harp song," an epic ideally chanted with harp accompaniment (as were the Iliad and Beowulf). young saw the quest for utopia as a grand tale, like the wanderings of Ulysses, and used a magniloquent prose style to give her theme epic grandeur. Her specialty was what she called the "dragnet" sentence: a long, paratactic sentence that would cast its net into a sea of facts and fancies, ideas and characters, and drag them into unexpected relationships. (There's one in Miss MacIntosh that's two pages long.)...
My one complaint about this fabulous book is its length: no, not the usual one that it's too long, but that it's not long enough. Five years ago both Young and editor Charles Ruas described Harp Song as a three-volume work of 800 pages each, yet what we have here is a single volume of 600 pages, without an editorial word about the second two volumes. In a cursory discussion of the surviving manuscript (in an otherwise useful introduction) Ruas says Young didn't quite finish the book, but he doesn't point out the present book contains only about half of what Young did finish....

See Michael Segers Review of Harp Song for a Radical at http://www.peanut.org/users/mike/text/Harpsong.htm

Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
by Marguerite Young, edited and with an introduction by Charles Ruas. Knopf, 599 pages, $35.
Review in The New York Review of Books, 7 October 1999, 4-8.
"Only in America" by Russell Baker.

See Steven Shaviro's Review of Harp Song for a Radical at http://www.dhalgren.com/booklist.html