Angel in the Forest: A Fariy Tale of Two Utopias (American Literature)

Angel in the Forest: A Fariy Tale of Two Utopias (American Literature) by Young, Marguerite. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781564780546.

This is the first paperback edition of Marguerite Youngs 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, 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 Owens New Moral World to George Bushs 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 Dorens introduction to Scribners 1966 reprint.