Equality

Equality (1897) is a novel by Edward Bellamy. The sequel to Bellamy’s bestselling novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) is a product of decades of work on the socialist theories that captivated thousands of Americans and inspired the formation of the People’s Party. Although Bellamy died before his vision could be realized, many of the ideas that circulate in Equality―including vegetarianism, feminism, and the abolition of private capital―continue to inform left-wing politics today. “He learned that there were no longer any who were or could be richer or poorer than others, but that all were economic equals. He learned that no one any longer worked for another, either by compulsion or for hire, but that all alike were in the service of the nation working for the common fund, which all equally shared…” After a century in a hypnosis-induced coma, Julian West emerges to a fundamentally different world. Shocked at first, he soon understands that the changes made to the American economy at the tail end of the Gilded Age were not only just, but entirely necessary. In this sequel to Looking Backward, 2000-1887, Bellamy provides more detail on the theories which informed the construction of a revolutionary socialist utopia in the United States.

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Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American journalist, novelist, and political activist. Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, he was the son of Baptist minister Rufus King Bellamy and his wife Maria. Educated at public school, he attended Union College for just one year before abandoning his studies to travel throughout Europe. Upon returning, he briefly considered a career in law before settling on journalism. Before his life was upended by tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bellamy worked at the New York Post and Springfield Union. After his diagnosis, he sought to recuperate in the Hawaiian Islands, returning to the United States in 1878. Thereafter, he pursued a career in fiction, publishing such psychological novels as Six to One (1878) and Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880). His first major work was Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a utopian science fiction novel which became an immediate bestseller in the United States and Great Britain. Its popularity spurred the founding of Nationalist Clubs around the country, wherein readers of Bellamy’s work gathered to discuss the author’s revolutionary vision of a new American society. In 1891, Bellamy founded The New Nation, a political magazine dedicated to the emerging People’s Party. A left-wing agrarian populist, Bellamy advocated for animal rights, wilderness preservation, and equality for women. His novel Equality (1897), a sequel to Looking Backward, expands upon the theories set out in his most popular work and was praised by such political thinkers as John Dewey and Peter Kropotkin. At the height of his career, Bellamy succumbed to tuberculosis in his hometown of Chicopee Falls.