Education Young studied at
Butler University in Indianapolis, receiving a BA in French and English. She then attended the
University of Chicago, auditing
Thornton Wilder's writing class at his invitation. While attending the University of Chicago, Young had a part-time position reading Shakespeare to Minna K. Weissenbach. A patron of
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Weissenbach was sometimes known as "the opium lady of
Hyde Park" and she became the inspiration for the Opium Lady in Young's
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Drug-based flights of fantasy were to make their way into the novel. She wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews while also teaching creative writing at various venues, including the
New School for Social Research,
Fordham University, and the
Iowa Writers' Workshop.In 1944, Scribners commissioned her to write a new work, ultimately published as the epic novel
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965). Young's next project was to be a biography of
Hoosier poet
James Whitcomb Riley, During Marguerite Young's final illness, she was nursed by Marilyn Hamilton and
Suzanne Oboler. Together, during this time, they compiled her unfinished manuscript and submitted it to her publisher. After her death, the manuscript was edited by
Charles Ruas to include Young's survey of utopian communities as well as her portraits of major historical figures encountered by Debs in his struggles as a labor organizer: the portraits of
Mary Todd Lincoln,
James Whitcomb Riley,
Joe Hill,
Sojourner Truth,
Brigham Young,
Joseph Smith and
Susan B. Anthony. This edited version of
Harp Song for a Radical was published by
Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. Also in her last illness, Marguerite Young returned to writing poetry.
Inviting the Muses, a collection of her stories, essays, and reviews, was published by
Dalkey Archive Press in 1994. Her
Collected Poems was published in 2022 by Chatwin Books/Sublunary Editions. Young's papers are at the
Beinecke Library,
Yale University. ==Personal life and death==