Edward Bellamy

Equality Edward Bellamy

The sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues the thread of his utopian vision. Equality begins when Julian West returns to the year 2000 to continue his education. The book describes an ideal society in that year. Equality was published just before his death and was not received nearly as well as Looking Backward. Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. His father was Rufus King Bellamy (1816-1886), a Baptist minister, and his mother was Maria Louisa (Putnam) Bellamy, a Calvinist. He had two older brothers, Frederick and Charles. He attended Union College, but did not graduate. While there, he joined the Theta Chi Chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. He studied law, but left the practice and worked briefly in the newspaper industry in New York and in Springfield, Massachusetts. He left journalism and devoted himself to literature, writing both short stories and novels. He married Emma Augusta Sanderson in 1882. The couple had two children, Paul (1884) and Marion (1886).