Angel in the Forest

A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias

By: Marguerite Young, Mark Van Doren (Introduction by)

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Paperback | 19 February 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
436 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.8 x 15.2 x 3.18

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Angel in the Forest is Marguerite Young''s fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.
In it, she recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana, a community originally founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who wanted to apply Scriptural communism to daily life in order to bring about the New Jerusalem. It was sold in 1825 to Robert Owen, the father of British socialism who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism.
Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen''s New Moral World to George Bush''s New World Order.
Written with the same elegance, wit, and lyric beauty that distinguishes her fiction, Angel in the Forest was widely praised upon its first publication in 1945. This edition includes Mark Van Doren''s introduction to Scribner''s 1966 reprint.

Industry Reviews

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

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