THE WRITER OF TWO COLLECTIONS of poetry, one collection of essays and stories, one massy novel (the recently reissued Miss MacIntosh, My Darling), and one unfinished biography of the turn-of-the-century socialist politician Eugene V. Debs, Marguerite Young (1908–1995) was born near New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two failed utopian communes that would become life-long preoccupations. Now enjoying a minor renaissance, Young’s fables of communal enchantment and disenchantment rhyme with the struggles of the contemporary left to articulate a sufficiently ambitious program of transformation. This is especially true of her most elegant tragicomedy of political imagination, Angel in the Forest, a history of the rise and fall of the two dreaming collectives of New Harmony. Young’s study inclines toward utopia in search of a viable realism. {read}