Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Written by Edward Bellamy
Narrated by LibriVox Community
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About this audiobook
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, first published in 1888. It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia. This book outlines Bellamy's complex thoughts about improving the future, and is an indictment of industrial capitalism. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia)
Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American journalist, novelist, and political activist. Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, he was the son of Baptist minister Rufus King Bellamy and his wife Maria. Educated at public school, he attended Union College for just one year before abandoning his studies to travel throughout Europe. Upon returning, he briefly considered a career in law before settling on journalism. Before his life was upended by tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bellamy worked at the New York Post and Springfield Union. After his diagnosis, he sought to recuperate in the Hawaiian Islands, returning to the United States in 1878. Thereafter, he pursued a career in fiction, publishing such psychological novels as Six to One (1878) and Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880). His first major work was Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a utopian science fiction novel which became an immediate bestseller in the United States and Great Britain. Its popularity spurred the founding of Nationalist Clubs around the country, wherein readers of Bellamy’s work gathered to discuss the author’s revolutionary vision of a new American society. In 1891, Bellamy founded The New Nation, a political magazine dedicated to the emerging People’s Party. A left-wing agrarian populist, Bellamy advocated for animal rights, wilderness preservation, and equality for women. His novel Equality (1897), a sequel to Looking Backward, expands upon the theories set out in his most popular work and was praised by such political thinkers as John Dewey and Peter Kropotkin. At the height of his career, Bellamy succumbed to tuberculosis in his hometown of Chicopee Falls.
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