num_pages: 203
description: 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.
language: English
title: Looking Backward 2000-1887
titlecomplete: Looking Backward 2000-1887
characters: Dr. Pillsbury, Dr. Leete, Edith Leete, Julian West, Sawyer, Edith Bartlett, Mr. Barton, Mrs. Leete
genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Politics, Philosophy, Utopia, Literature, Classics, Time Travel, 19th Century, Dystopia
ratings_count: 5966
places: Boston, Massachusetts, The United States of America
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company