Books by Edward Bellamy

This marvelous book is the sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues the thread of his utopian vision. Equality begins when Julian West returns to the year 2000 to continue his education. The book describes an ideal society in that year. Equality was published just before his death and was not received nearly as well as Looking Backward. Bellamy was born in 1850 in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. As a young man he studied law and entered the bar, but never practiced. He was a journalist and social theorist as well as a novelist. Bellamy's theory of public capitalism would greatly affect American political thought in the 20th century.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced by an "industrial army" and every citizen receives the same wage. This edition contains a rich selection of appendices, including excerpts from Bellamy's Equality and other writings; contemporary responses (by William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others); excerpts from utopian works by Morris and William Dean Howells; and an excerpt from Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.