About this ebook
Edward Bellamy is best remembered for the utopian novel Looking Backward, which had a profound cultural impact when it was published, inciting many readers to form organizations seeking to put the book's ideas into practice. The charming short story "Hooking Watermelons," chock-full of local color, illustrates how something as seemingly innocuous as a melon patch can actually be a symbol of intractable social divides.
About the author
It is as a romantric Utopian rather than a novelist or profound thinker that Edward Bellamy is remembered and read today. While working as a journalist in Springfield, Massachusetts, he began to write novels and later short stories but did not achieve much success until the publication of Looking Backward (1888). The hero of this fantasy falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to find himself in a humane scientific and socialistic utopia. After selling fewer than 10,000 copies in its first year, Looking Backward became enormously popular. Clubs were formed to promote Bellamy's social ideas, and he became a leader of a nationalist movement, crusading for economic equality, brotherhood, and the progressive nationalization of industry. Americans as diverse as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey have been influenced by Bellamy's suggestion that the products of industrial energy, intelligently organized, could be used to obtain a nobler future. His The Religion of Solidarity (1940), long out of print, is again available.
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