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)