Looking Backward 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about a nineteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep of more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. The novel had an enormous impact at the time of its publication, setting in motion a wave of reform activity and creating a vogue for utopian novels that continued over the next three decades.

Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's early novels, including Six to One (1878), Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), and Miss Ludington's Sister (1885) did not bring him much renown, but a turn to utopian science fiction with Looking Backward, published in January 1888, captured the public imagination and catapulted Bellamy to literary fame. Within a year the book had sold some 200,000 copies and by the end of the 19th century it had sold more copies than nearly any other book published in America up to that time, as well as spawning political movements around the country. Bellamy died of tuberculosis at the age of 48.