Angel in the Forest

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

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 and Harp Song for a Radical.