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Looking Backward
Cover of Looking Backward
Looking Backward
Borrow Borrow

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 Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century—and 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, Bellamy's visionary view of the future offers a blueprint of the "perfect society," 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 Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.

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 Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century—and 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, Bellamy's visionary view of the future offers a blueprint of the "perfect society," 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 Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.

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    1
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    1
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  • ATOS:
  • Lexile:
  • Interest Level:
  • Text Difficulty:
    10 - 12


About the Author-
  • Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) 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.

Reviews-
  • AudioFile Magazine Here is the sort of intellectual Buck Rogers. In this nearly forgotten classic, a member of the Boston leisure class falls asleep in 1888 and wakes in 2000. Thence follows endless conversations reflecting journalist/fictionalist Edward Bellamy's prescient solutions to the problems of Victorian industrialism. This is less a novel than a dialectic, a quality that Edward Lewis's dry reading emphasizes. He sounds like an academic reading a paper to the Academy. His precise diction and phrasing are important pluses, given the fustian locutions he has to deal with. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
  • AudioFile Magazine An aristocrat from Victorian Boston mysteriously finds himself in a social Utopia in the year 2000. Enlightened for 1887, this noble vision seems even more remote now that the set time is so near. With his deep, rich voice Brian Marsh appropriately depicts a gentleman from the Gilded Age. Marsh puts a great deal of feeling into his characterizations, but this causes some fluctuations in sound level--perhaps a production, rather than an acting shortfall. Despite such minor glitches, this is a fine presentation of a worthwhile book. D.J. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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    Blackstone Publishing
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    All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed at the end of the lending period.

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Looking Backward
Looking Backward
Edward Bellamy
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