She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised by her maternal grandmother, who nurtured her love of literature. Young attended Butler University in Indianapolis, receiving a BA in English and French. She earned her MA from the University of Chicago in Epic and Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature.
Working as a high school English teacher, her first book of poetry was published in 1937. In that year, she visited the utopian commune in New Harmony, Indiana, where her mother and stepfather lived. She moved to New Harmony and spent seven years there, starting work on Angel in the Forest, about utopian life.
The book appeared in 1945, and was well-received. She won the Guggenheim award and the Newberry Library award. Over the next fifty years, while mostly maintaining a New York address, she traveled extensively and collaborated with other authors, including Anaïs Nin, writing articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She also taught writing at a number of venues.
At the time of her death, she still had not finished her strange "Eugene Debs" book, Harp Song for a Radical, on which she had labored over a period of thirty years. It finally came out in 1999, or rather, the publisher saw fit to publish about half of her lengthy manuscript.
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