Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Marguerite Young |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Paul Bacon |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Psychological novel |
| Published | 1965 (Scribner's) |
| Pages | 1198 |
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."
The novel is one of the longest ever written.
Young began writing the novel in 1947, expecting it would take two years. She worked on it daily, and did not finish until 1964. Young has said that had she known it would have taken her so long she would never have started.
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.
The book was typeset by computer, and consumed "38 miles of computer tape".
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. 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.
Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry, was the inspiration for Hannah Freemount-Snowden.
Howard Mitcham, a deaf Greenwich Village artist and bohemian, was the inspiration for the stone-deaf man.
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Wikipedia