Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston man who is mysteriously transported from the 19th to the 21st century--from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty.

The year is 2000. The place: Utopian America. The hero: anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life...

Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the "perfect society," a guidebook that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age. Today--in the very era it attempted to visualize--it is even more compelling than ever.

With an Introduction by Walter James Miller
And an Afterword by Eliot Fintushel

About the Author:

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was admitted to the bar in 1871, but that same year he abandoned his practice to become associate editor of the Springfield Union (Massachusetts). Later, he worked as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. Bellamy's heart was no more in newspaper work than it had been in the law. His main interest lay in the field of literature. He wrote several short stories and three novels, including Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), before he married Emma Sanderson in 1882. Forced by ill health to give up his editorial career, Bellamy devoted himself to writing. His novel Miss Ludington's Sister was published in 1884. The young author's intense awareness of injustices in the economic and social systems, as well as his desire for reforms, impelled him to write Looking Backward in 1888. "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up across the nation and the novelist embarked on a series of lecture tours and speaking engagements. In 1891, he founded the New Nation, a Boston newspaper, as an organ for his views, but increasing illness forced him to suspend publication. He continued, however, to work on the sequel to Looking Backward. It was published under the title Equality in 1897.

Walter James Miller--poet, playwright, critic, translator--has authored, co-authored, or edited 64 books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of television and radio programs. Professor of English at New York University, he has won a writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts/ Ruttenberg Foundation.

Eliot Fintushel writes novels and short stories in and around the genre of science fiction and is a contributing editor to Tricycle magazine. Away from the word processor, he is also a busker and a traveling showman, a two-time winner of the National Endowment's Fellowship for Solo Performance Artists.