From Publishers Weekly
With the extravagance of a poet rather than the pedantry of a historian, Young's long out of print study conjures up the spirit of two failed 19th-century attempts to establish utopias in New Harmony, Ind. The first was the celibate, spiritual society of Father Rapp (1814-1825), the other the rational, socialist order of Robert Owen (1825-1827). Father Rapp presided over a strict, regimented community (dictated by the visitation of an angel), guiding his people to prosperity through the sale of everything from hogs and shoes to gunpowder and whiskey, but creating a repressive regime that required slavish obedience--sexual abstinence was enforced, even when it meant emasculating his own son when that son fathered a child. Owen, by contrast, preached a doctrine of rationality, equality, happiness and social sympathy, that people are not innately sinful but molded by institutions. To put his ideals into practice, he transformed the Scottish mill town of New Lanark according to humanitarian principles, and then purchased New Harmony from Rapp to create a model of socialist perfection--a vain but splendid dream. Young relates all this in a lavish style that evokes the magic and pathos of the experiments. She is a superb storyteller whose allusions, images and digressions are even more telling than the story told. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Publishers Weekly 7-11-94
"[Young] is a superb storyteller whose allusions, images, and digressions are even more telling than the story told."


New Republic 4-16-45
"A work of immense erudition. The tale is crowded with superb originals. This is a book! Brilliance and wisdom . . . a masterwork."


Kirkus 1-15-45
"An interesting, showy but intense study of curious, wonderful and far-reaching patterns of thought and living."


Carlos Baker, New York Times Book Review 4-8-45
"Young's satiric portraits of sundry utopian eccentrics greatly strengthens her book."


Martin Leowitz, Nation 5-12-45
"A superb drama of man's folly and wisdom. . . . Young is eloquent in the tradition of Whitman, Melville, and Faulkner."


Book Description
history of utopian 19th-c New Harmony, Indiana

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is the first paperback edition of Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.Angel in the Forest recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana. The original community was 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.

"A superb drama of man's folly and wisdom. . . . Young is eloquent in the tradition of Whitman, Melville, and Faulkner." (Martin Leowitz, Nation 5-12-45)

"Young's satiric portraits of sundry utopian eccentrics greatly strengthens her book." (Carlos Baker, New York Times Book Review 4-8-45)

"An interesting, showy but intense study of curious, wonderful and far-reaching patterns of thought and living." (Kirkus 1-15-45)

"A work of immense erudition. The tale is crowded with superb originals. This is a book! Brilliance and wisdom . . . a masterwork." (New Republic 4-16-45)

"[Young] is a superb storyteller whose allusions, images, and digressions are even more telling than the story told." (Publishers Weekly 7-11-94)

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly