Marguerite Young

Marguerite Vivian Young (August 26, 1908 – November 17, 1995) was a American poet, novelist, biographer and critic. She is best known for her novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. In her later years, she was known for teaching of creative writing and as a mentor to young authors.^[2]

Life and work

Early life

Young was born in Indianapolis, Indiana.^[2] Through her father, Chester Ellis Young, she was a collateral descendant of Brigham Young,^[3] and by her mother, Fay Herron Knight, she was a direct descendant of John Knox.^[3]

Young's parents separated when she was very young, and she and her sister, Naomi, were brought up by their maternal grandmother, Marguerite Herron Knight, who was convinced the child Marguerite was the reincarnation of her dead cousin, Little Harry. ^{[citation needed]} Her grandmother nurtured Young's love of literature. Young studied at Butler University in Indianapolis, receiving a BA in French and English. She then attended the University of Chicago, auditing Thornton Wilder's writing class at his invitation and earning her MA in Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature.

While attending the University of Chicago, Young had a part-time position reading Shakespeare to Minna K. Weissenbach. A patron of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Weissenbach was also known as the opium lady of Hyde Park. Weissenbach was to be the inspiration for the Opium Lady in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and the drug-based flights of fantasy were to make their way into the novel.^[2][4]

Literary career

Young's first book of poetry, Prismatic Ground, was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited the commune of New Harmony, Indiana, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities, at the same time producing, Moderate Fable (1944), which won the poetry prize from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Angel in the Forest appeared in 1945 and was well received, winning Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards.

Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, young traveled extensively and was part of a wide literary circle that included Mari Sandoz, Richard Wright, Anaïs Nin, Allan Tate, with whom she had an affair, and Flannery O'Connor.^{[citation needed]} She also had a competitive friendship with Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. She wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews while also teaching creative writing at various venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.

As early as 1947 Young began working on a new project that would evolve into the epic novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Although she had intended to take just two years, she did not finish her novel until 1963. Young described it as "an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise."^[3] Anaïs Nin, in The Novel of the Future, calls it "an epic American novel written in a poetic style." Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was not well received critically. Starting in 1975, Charles Ruas produced for New York radio station WBAI a year-long series of readings of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling called The Reading Experiment. The readings were by Young's contemporaries in the literary, theatre, and journalistic worlds, such as Leo Lerman, Wyatt Cooper, Osceola Archer, James Coco, Peggy Cass, and Earle Hyman. The artist Rob Wynne scored each program with concrete sound effects and atonal and harmonic music, as well as opera. The programs were distributed nationally through the Pacifica Radio Network. Renewed interest in the book resulted in the publication in the late 1980s of a two-volume edition by Dalkey Archive Press.

Debs

Young's next project was to be a biography of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley,^[3][5] the creator of Little Orphant Annie. She began to focus on Riley's friendship with Eugene V. Debs.^[6] The digression was to occupy the rest of her life, becoming the ambitious biography of Debs, the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States (1904, 1908, 1912, 1920).^[2] Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, remained unfinished at the time of her death.

Part I, “Prelude in a Golden Key,” portrays Swiss agnostic Wilhelm Weitling’s cross-country tour of all the pioneer communities that took part in the Western settlement of the United States. He visited the Mormon community first in Nauvoo, Missouri, and then after their flight and resettlement; the Shakers; the Amish communities in Pennsylvania; the Oneida community; the Icarians; the Rappites, and many other settlements in the wilderness. Through this perspective Young establishes that this nation was founded and settled on the principles of communal ownership and mutual assistance. In Part II of Harp Song for a Radical]], Young establishes that Eugene Debs was the catalyst through which these principles are continued in the tenets of the labor movement in the nineteenth century.

The unfinished manuscript was edited by Charles Ruas to give Young's survey of the utopian communities and to include her historical portraits of major figures encountered by Debs: the portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Hill, Sojourner Truth, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and Susan B. Anthony. This edited version of Harp Song for a Radical was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. Young’s papers were subsequently deposited at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

List of works

• Prismatic Ground (1937)
• Moderate Fable (1944)
• Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945)
• Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)
• Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (1994)
• Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs (1999)

References

External links

• Photograph of Young with Truman Capote: "LIFE visits Yaddo". Life 21 (3): 110. 1946-07-15. 
• Wakeman, John (ed.) World Authors 1950-1970, H. W. Wilson, New York (1975).
• Ruas, Charles E. (Fall 1977). "Marguerite Young, The Art of Fiction No. 66". The Paris Review. 
• Harp Song for a Radical
• NYT obituary reprinted in 52 McGs.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas ISBN 978-0-7432-1562-6