This book is the reproduction of the original version published: New York: Modern Library, 1915.

First published in 1888 and a phenomenal bestseller, Looking Backward is Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about a nineteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep of more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. More than just a fanciful novel, Looking Backward was, in effect, Bellamy's blueprint for a socialist-type state, conceived in response to the problems of the Gilded Age brought on in part by the pace of late-nineteenth-century industrialization. The novel had an enormous impact at the time of its publication, setting in motion a wave of reform activity and creating a vogue for utopian novels that continued over the next three decades. In addition to an extensive introduction, Daniel Borus's new edition of Looking Backward contains a chronology of Bellamy's life, a bibliography, questions to consider when reading the novel, and an index._Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.