The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamys prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuryfrom a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty. Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionarys view of the future. It is a blueprint of the perfect society, a guidebook that stimulated some of the prominent thinkers of our age. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, listed Edward Bellamys novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), US author and journalist, the latter from 1871, when he abandoned the practice of law before having properly begun it. He was born at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, studied at Union College in Schenectady, New York and in Europe. He was admitted to the bar in 1871, but that same year abandoned his practice to become associate editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. Later he worked as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. Bellamy's heart was primarily in the field of literature, however; he wrote several short stories and three novels, including Dr. Heidenhof'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. 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 he embarked on a series of lecture tours and speaking engagements. In 1981, he founded the New Nation, a Boston newspaper, as an organ for his views, but increasing illness forced him to suspend publication. Bellamy died of tuberculosis in 1898; the sequel to Looking Backward, Equality was published the year before his death.