Young's first book of poetry, Prismatic Ground, was published in 1937,[5] while she was teaching English at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis.

[1][5] She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities, at the same time producing Moderate Fable (1944), which won the poetry prize from the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York City's Greenwich Village, Young traveled extensively and was part of a wide literary circle that included Mari Sandoz, Richard Wright, Anaïs Nin, Flannery O'Connor, Marianne Hauser and Allen Tate, with whom she had an affair.

[1] She also had a complex friendship with Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, with whom she published in the international literary magazine Botteghe Oscure, edited by Princess Marguerite Chapin Caetini.

[5] Young 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.

[3] The digression was to occupy the rest of her life, becoming an ambitious biography of Debs, the union organizer who evolved into the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States (1904, 1908, 1912, 1920).

[5] Part I, “Prelude in a Golden Key,” portrays Swiss agnostic Wilhelm Weitling’s cross-country tour of the pioneer utopian communities built during the settlement of the western United States.

In Part II of Harp Song for a Radical, Young establishes that Eugene Debs was the catalyst through which these principles became the basic tenets of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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.

[15] The readings were by Young's contemporaries in the literary, theatre, and journalistic worlds, such as Leo Lerman, Wyatt Cooper, Osceola Archer, Marian Seldes, Ruth Ford, James Coco, Peggy Cass, and Earle Hyman.

The artist Rob Wynne scored each program with concrete sound effects and atonal and harmonic music, as well as opera.

In 2024, Dalkey Archive Press published a new one-volume edition that, despite returning the novel to print after decades of unavailability, introduced numerous typographical errors into the text.