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.

Contents

New Harmony Today?A Glimpse in Summer, 1940

Backward into Old Harmony?A Dissolving Vista

The Children of the Ozarks, 1940

The Children of Israel

A Journey to the Wabash

A Machine Like Clockwork

A City Whose Ten Gates Are of Gold

Frederick Rapp, the Lord Temporal

The Exodus of the Rappites from Harmony

The Coming of One

The Fading of the Golden Rose

Another Coming, Another Dispensation

A Pilgrim's Progress

Dearest Caroline

An Eden of Children

Paradise Was Lost

Jehovah and Rousseau

Interviews with Emperors and Kings

New Harmony, the Goal of Man

America, the Promised Land

The Pears Family

The Fool of Nature

Noah's Ark, the Maid of Mist, the Boatload of Knowledge

New Harmony, the Golden Rose

An Adult View

Serpents in the Garden

The Declaration of Mental Independence

Exodus from New Harmony

Glaucas, 1940

The Third Age of New Harmony

Robert Owen's Ideal Made Real to Dwell Among Us

Builder of Old Harmony

Utopia in Bedlam

Farewell to New Harmony

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.