Description
Book SynopsisAngel 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.
Trade Review“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 PorterTable of ContentsContents
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
