Looking Backward

First published in 1888 and a phenomenal best-seller, "Looking Backward" is Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about ninteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep for more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. More than just a fanciful novel, "Looking Backward" was, in effect, Bellamy's blueprint for a socialist-type state, conceived in response to problems of the Gilded Age brought on in part by the pace of the late-nineteenth-century industrialization. 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. In addition to an extensive introduction, Daniel Borus's new edition of "Looking Backward" contains a chronology of Bellamy's life, a bibliography, questions to consider when reading the novel, and an index.

Walter James Miller—poet, playwright, critic, translator—has authored, co-authored, or edited sixty-four books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of television and radio programs. A Professor of English at New York University, he has won a writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts/Ruttenberg Foundation. His own translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is published by Naval Institute Press.