Edward Bellamy (1850 – 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, set in the year 2000.
Easton Press Edward Bellamy books
Looking Backward - Masterpieces of American Literature - 1981
Looking Backward - Books The Changed The World - 1992
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Who was Edward Bellamy?
Edward Bellamy was born March 26, 1850 in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. His father was Rufus King Bellamy (1816-1886), a Baptist minister and a descendant of Joseph Bellamy. His mother was Maria Louisa (Putnam) Bellamy, a Calvinist. Her father, Benjamin Putnam, had also been a Baptist minister, but had to withdraw from the ministry in Salem, Massachusetts, following objections to him becoming a Freemason. He had two older brothers, Frederick and Charles. He attended Union College, but did not graduate. While there, he joined the Theta Chi Chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He studied law, but left the practice and worked briefly in the newspaper industry in New York and in Springfield, Massachusetts. He left journalism and devoted himself to literature, writing both short stories and novels. He married Emma Augusta Sanderson in 1882. The couple had two children, Paul (b. 1884) and Marion (b. 1886).
He was the cousin of Francis Bellamy, most famous for creating the Pledge of Allegiance.
His books include Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), Miss Ludington's Sister (1884), The Duke of Stockbridge (1900), and the utopian novels Looking Backward: 2000—1887 (1888), and its sequel, Equality (1897).
Bellamy died May 22, 1898 (aged 48 years) from tuberculosis at his childhood home in Chicopee Falls.
Writer
According to Erich Fromm, Bellamy's novel Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America." It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. In the book, Julian West, an upper class man from 1887, awakes in 2000 from a hypnotic trance to find himself in a socialist utopia. The book influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement." "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up all over the United States for discussing and propagating the book's ideas. This political movement came to be known as Nationalism. His novel also inspired several utopian communities. Although Looking Backward is unique, Bellamy owes many aspects of his philosophy to a previous reformer and author, Laurence Gronlund, who published his treatise "The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism" in 1884.
Bellamy's second utopian novel, Equality (book)|Equality, published in 1897, continues the story of Julian West as he adjusts to life in the future. Although Equity was less successful commercially or culturally than its prequel, a short story "The Parable of the Water-Tank" from Equality, was popular with a number of early American socialists, reprinted in various editions as a propaganda pamphlet.
Several hundred additional utopian novels were published in the US from 1889 to 1900, due in part to the popularity of Looking Backward.
Edward Bellamy books in order
Six to One (1878)
Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880)
Miss Ludington's Sister (1885)
Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888)
Equality (1897)
The Duke of Stockbridge; a Romance of Shays' Rebellion (1900)
Short stories
At Pinney's Ranch
The Blindman's World
Deserted
An Echo Of Antietam
Hooking Watermelons
Lost
A Love Story Reversed
The Old Folks' Party
A Positive Romance
Potts's Painless Cure
A Summer Evening's Dream
To Whom This May Come
Two Days' Solitary Imprisonment
With The Eyes Shut
The Cold Snap
The Old Folks' Party
Non-fiction
Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! (1937)
Talks on Nationalism (1938)
Edward Bellamy quotes
"Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos."
"The privilege of any individual to use the land for the purpose of making profit by its cultivation is but an instance of the general principle of private property, and has no place in the economy of the future."
"Nationalism is the imperative logical deduction from the doctrine of evolution as applied to human society. If the struggle for existence, operating with increasing intensity, must in the end prevail throughout nature, it follows that the nation, as the most highly organized form of collective life, will become the arena of its fiercest manifestations."
"Human nature, like all other nature, is a great circular stream, rolling on from the beginning to the end. It is a stream in which all the tributary streams of history and tradition are endlessly swirling."
Source and additional information: Edward Bellamy