Young, Marguerite (1908–1995)

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Young, Marguerite (1908–1995)

American educator, poet, and novelist. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1908; died on November 17, 1995, in Indianapolis; daughter of Chester Ellis Young (a salesman) and Fay (Knight) Young; attended Indiana University; Butler University, B.A., 1930; University of Chicago, M.A., 1936; graduate work at University of Iowa.

Awards:

Grants from American Association of University Women, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1946), Guggenheim Foundation (1948), Rockefeller Foundation, and Newberry Library.

Selected writings:

(poetry) Prismatic Ground (Macmillan, 1937); (poetry) Moderate Fable (Reynal& Hitchcock, 1945); Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945, new edition with preface by Mark Van Doren, Scribner, 1966); (novel) Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (Scribner, 1965); The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young (1990); Nothing But the Truth (NY: Carlton Press, 1993); Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994); Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs (Knopf, 1999).

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, 18 years in the writing and 1,200 pages long, was hailed as a masterpiece and its author was compared to James Joyce and Marcel Proust. William Goyen calls the book "a mammoth epic, a massive fable, a picaresque journey, a Faustian quest and a work of stunning magnitude and beauty." The novel deals with the nature of dreams and reality. Wrote Young: "Every sentence in my book has to do with one of four categories of the dreamworld everyone inhabits. Sometimes reality

is a dream that crumbles before your eyes. As when someone you deeply love is taken from you, and everything you cherished suddenly vanishes. Sometimes the reality you thought was a dream turns out to be real. You might see an elephant walking down the road. You think you are dreaming, but it turns out an elephant has escaped from the circus and is walking down the road. Sometimes a dream is a dream. Knowing this fact is the difference between being sane and crazy. And the greatest tragedy of all is when reality turns out to be reality and the unbelievable thing must be faced as true. As when a man walks in to his wife at breakfast and tells her what she knew all along but pretended was a dream, that he has fallen in love with someone else and wants a divorce."

Those who, like William Goyen, praise the technique used in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling consider the style to be "the very theme itself." Marion Simon writes: "The language and even the length of this book are as important to the creation of Miss Young's vision as are the many and secret lives of the novel's characters. Long convoluted sentence follows long convoluted sentence. Images are drawn and redrawn, pounded into shape again and again, but never twice into exactly the same shape…. There is no sure ground in Miss Young's vision where the reader may set a steady foot." Goyen believes the force and vigor displayed are almost unique in American fiction: "we have come upon a strong, deep loudness, a full-throated outcry, a literature of expanse and daring that makes most of our notable male writers look like a motorcycle gang trying to prove a kind of literary masculinity."

During her career, Young worked as a teacher. She served on the faculty at an Indianapolis high school, and followed that with stints at the University of Iowa from 1955 until 1957, New York's New School for Social Research from 1958 until 1967, and Fairleigh Dickinson University from 1960 until 1962. Other posts included Indiana University, Fordham University, and Seton Hall University. She was a Greenwich Village legend, wrote The New York Times News Service. She was "the woman with the pageboy haircut who looked like W.H. Auden, wrote like James Joyce, strode through the Village in her signature serapes, had breakfast at Bigelow's with Richard Wright, got drunk at the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, palled around with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers , kept a vast collection of dolls in her Bleecker Street apartment and regaled intimates with tales of her romantic conquests." At the time of her death, Young was working onHarp Song for a Radical, a biography of Eugene V. Debs; it was edited by Charles Ruas and published by Knopf in 1999.