Please join us as Ray Rauth leads a discussion of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.

One of the most commercially successful fiction works of the 19th-century, translated into 20 languages and selling over 1 million copies, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was also hugely consequential. In addition to inspiring over 150 “Nationalist Clubs” throughout the country, it arguably also spawned an entire political movement as influential leaders like John Dewey and Eugene Debs adapted the philosophy underlying the book to a political platform. As we follow the main character, looking backward from the year 2000 to the late-1880s, we’ll see how prescient Bellamy was…or wasn’t. And his “future” society’s make-up will give us plenty to talk about.  From the Oxford University Press: “a book whose thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and vision of life in a socialist utopia still touches a nerve in the twenty-first century.”