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New book at mcgrewbooks.com


Vachel Lindsay wrote The Golden Book of Springfield between 1904 and 1919, and it was published in 1920. It is a speculative fiction look at his city a hundred years in his future, our present two years from now when Illinois celebrates its bicentennial of statehood.
It has little technological or scientific advance, despite the huge technological advances the world went through as he wrote it. Rather than science fiction,it is future fantasy fiction.
It’s also surrealism like German writers at the time were writing.
It’s also a ghost story, written by a real ghost. It reads “And my bones crumble through the century, like last year’s autumn leaves. Then there is, alternating with drouth, bitter frost. And roots wrap my heart and brain. And there is sleep.
“Then a galloping and gay shrieking, away on the road, to the East of Oak Ridge! And though I am six feet beneath the ground the eyes of the soul are given me. I see wonderful young horsewomen...”
Lindsay committed suicide in 1931. If that’s not a ghost story, what is?
What it certainly is not is what Wikipedia and every other thing I’ve seen written about it says it is; it is most certainly not “utopian fiction.” How can you call a world with murders by lynching, shooting, stabbing, poisoning, and fire, as well as a world war over a religion devoted to cocaine “utopia”? That certainly isn’t my idea of utopia.
I took a bad OCR of the 1920 book from Archive.org and edited it to match the scanned images, The link is the picture of the book’s cover. Enjoy!

 

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