Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
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. Writing the novel. 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: According to the dust jacket, 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. Character summary. The following brief summaries refer to the "core" descriptions, which are frequently questioned and contradicted. Some are inconsistent, as in dreams. Sources. 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. Influence and reception. 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." 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, wrote a review for the "Los Angeles Times". 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.