List of sequels to Looking Backward

This is an incomplete list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

Looking Backward is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts. First published in 1888 (Ticknor and Company Copyrighted the work in 1887), it describes a young man, named Julian West, who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find the USA has become a socialist utopia. In the first years of its release, Looking Backward sold more than 1 million copies. More than 160 Nationalist Clubs formed to propagate the book's ideas. Many authors wrote utopian fiction to attack, support, ridicule, or defend Bellamy's ideas. Scholars count over 150 sequels or other fictional responses to Bellamy's book.[1][2][3] This list focuses on works that (to various extents) use the same setting or characters as Looking Backward, and was derived from several sources.[4]

Directly 'anti-Bellamy' responses

Direct and positive utopian responses / unofficial sequels

Equality

A. D. 2050

A Leap Into the Future

Looking Backward and What I Saw

Looking Further Forward

Looking Further Backward

One of "Berrian's" Novels

Looking Beyond

Mr. East's Experiences in Mr. Bellamy's World

Looking Within

Young West

My Afterdream

Looking Forward

Looking Backward from the Year 2000

Equality in the Year 2000

Edward Bellamy Writes Again

References

  1. Kenneth M. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 18881900, Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1976; pp. 186-207.
  2. Richard Toby Widdicombe, Edward Bellamy: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Criticism, New York, Garland, 1988.
  3. Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 15161975: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston, G. K. Hall, 1979.
  4. G. Claeys Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospective, (Pickering and Chatto, London, 2008), J. Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America 1886-1896: The Politics of Form, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1984), K. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900, (Kent State University Press, Kent, 1976), K. Roemer, Utopian Audiences, How Readers Locate Nowhere, (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2003), C.J. Rooney, Dreams and Visions: a study of American utopias, 1865-1917 (1997), F. Shor, Utopianism and radicalism in a reforming America, 1888-1918, (Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut, 1997), and especially L.T. Sargent British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (Garland Publishing, New York, 1988).