Looking Backward: 2000-1887

First published in 1888 and a phenomenal bestseller, Looking Backward is 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. More than just a fanciful novel, Looking Backward was, in effect, Bellamy's blueprint for a socialist-type state, conceived in response to the problems of the Gilded Age brought on in part by the pace of 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.