Bellamy, << BEHL uh mee, >> Edward (1850-1898), an American author, wrote Looking Backward (1888), one of the most popular and influential novels of the 1800’s. The hero of the story is a young Boston man who falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000. He finds that the United States has become a socialist economic state that has eliminated all competition and private enterprise. The new order has produced an ideal society in which the people are happy, healthy, and well educated. All the people are equal economically. Thus, poverty, crime, and war have disappeared.
In Looking Backward, Bellamy attacked the inequality and injustices that he saw in the capitalist society of his time. The success of the book led to the establishment of more than 150 clubs that promoted social reform and spread Bellamy’s ideas.
Bellamy was born on March 26, 1850, in what is now Chicopee, Massachusetts. He wrote much other fiction, but none of his other works achieved the fame of Looking Backward. Bellamy died on May 22, 1898.
