Looking Backward
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The time is tomorrow. The place: a utopian America. The hero: anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamyβs prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuryβand from 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, Bellamyβs visionary view of the future offers a blueprint of the βperfect society,β a guidebook that stimulated some of the most prominent thinkers of our age. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, all listed Edward Bellamyβs novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.
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Edward Bellamy (1850β1898) was a US author and journalist who abandoned his law practice to become associate editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. Later he worked as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post and founded the New Nation, a Boston newspaper, as an organ for his views about the injustices in the economic and social systems. But his heart was primarily in the field of literature, and he wrote several short stories and novels.
Edward Lewis (a.k.a. David Hilder) is a stage, film, and television actor. He has narrated unabridged audiobooks for over eighteen years and has recorded more than two hundred titles, spanning works of fiction and nonfiction.
