Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a novel by Marguerite Young. She has described it as "an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise."[1]
The novel is one of the longest ever written.
Young began writing the novel in 1945, expecting it would take two years. She worked on it daily, and did not finish until 1964.[1][2][3] Young has said that had she known it would have taken her so long she would never have started.[4]
Young had been encouraged by Maxwell Perkins, when she submitted a 40-page initial manuscript for the novel, then named Worm in the Wheat. Over the years, staff at Scribner's had read portions of the work-in-progress. Nevertheless, the full manuscript was something of a surprise when delivered in February 1964:
When the final great batch of typescript arrived, I looked with some apprehension at the number on the last page. The number was 3,449. I spoke of it to the manufacturing department, who looked grim. Someone helpfully mentioned the volumes of Proust.— Burroughs Mitchell, The Chicago Tribune[2]
When the final great batch of typescript arrived, I looked with some apprehension at the number on the last page. The number was 3,449. I spoke of it to the manufacturing department, who looked grim. Someone helpfully mentioned the volumes of Proust.
The book was typeset by computer and consumed "38 miles of computer tape".[2]
According to the dust jacket,
At one time in the Gare Lazare in Paris, seven suitcases of the manuscript were lost—but were retrieved by seven men from Cook's with seven wheelbarrows.
In a 1993 interview, Young confirmed the story.[5] During the interview, Young stated that Miss MacIntosh was the only invented character in the novel, the rest having all been based on real people. She also said that she had thought that What Cheer, Iowa was a fictional place.
The following brief summaries refer to the "core" descriptions, which are frequently questioned and contradicted. Some are inconsistent, as in dreams.
Minna K. Weissenbach, a rich patron of Edna St. Vincent Millay, also known as the opium lady of Hyde Park, was the inspiration for Catherine Cartwheel.[6][7][8]
Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry, was the inspiration for Hannah Freemount-Snowden.[9][10]
Howard Mitcham, a deaf Greenwich Village artist and bohemian, was the inspiration for the stone-deaf man.[11]
As she worked on The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from Miss MacIntosh at random. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me."[12] Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.
Anaïs Nin, a friend and neighbor of Young, apparently the novel's first reader,[2] wrote a review for the Los Angeles Times.[13] This review also appeared in the sixth volume of her diaries after their publication. It served as an introduction to the 1979 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich paperback edition.
A number of writers have given the work high praise.
Marguerite Young is unquestionably a genius.— Kurt Vonnegut
Marguerite Young is unquestionably a genius.
A novel of massive achievement.— Jerzy Kosinski
A novel of massive achievement.
The most important work in American literature since ... Moby-Dick.— Howell Pearre, Nashville Banner
The most important work in American literature since ... Moby-Dick.
A work of stunning magnitude and beauty....in the great styles of Joyce or Broch or Melville or Faulkner...a masterwork.— William Goyen, New York Times Book Review, 9/12/1965
A work of stunning magnitude and beauty....in the great styles of Joyce or Broch or Melville or Faulkner...a masterwork.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves.— Nona Balakian
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves.
In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965
In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.
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