Marguerite Young

Marguerite Vivian Young (August 28, 1908 – November 17, 1995) was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in social issues and environmentalism.

She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised by her maternal grandmother, who nurtured her love of literature. Young studied at Butler University in Indianapolis, receiving a BA in English and French. She then attended the University of Chicago, visiting Thornton Wilder's writing class and earning her MA in Epic and Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature.

Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited the utopian 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.

That book appeared in 1945 and was well-received: It won the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and collaborated with other authors, including Anaïs Nin, writing articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She also taught writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.

At the time of her death, her massive and idiosyncratic work on the life and times of Eugene V. Debs, Harp Song for a Radical, on which she'd labored for more than thirty years, remained unfinished. An abbreviated and heavily edited version of that work-in-progress was published in 1999 by the Alfred A. Knopf publishing group.

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)
• Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs (1999)

References

• Connie Eichenlaub's comprehensive Marguerite Young website
• Love Song for an Author
• Harp Song for a Radical
• Charles E. Ruas (Fall 1977). "Marguerite Young, The Art of Fiction No. 66". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3547/the-art-of-fiction-no-66-marguerite-young. 

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Name	Young, Marguerite
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Date of birth	August 28, 1908
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Date of death	November 17, 1995
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