Fiction. Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was the most intensely romantic U.S. poet of his generation, a Prairie State populist called by Harriet Monroe of Poetry the most gifted and original poet we have ever printed. In this radically nonconformist dream of the future, the coffee houses, movie theatres, streets and parks of Springfield in the Mystic Year 2018 is the setting for a valient struggle to transform a village dominated by shady politicians, lynch mobs, commercialism and cocaine into a new paradise. THE GOLDEN BOOK offers no blueprint, but rather a poet's possibilities dreamed at the cross streets of vision.
