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Edward Bellamy owes his entire literary reputation to a single work, Looking Backward (1888), one of the relatively few American books to have an indisputable effect on society and politics. Along with Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Ben-Hur (1880), Looking Backward was one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century. Probably more directly than any other American novel, except perhaps Uncle Tom's Cabin, Looking Backward rendered in comprehensible terms its readers' deepest social anxieties. Bellamy's analysis of the dislocations of an increasingly industrialized America and his mix of cultural and technological solutions to the most disturbing social problems, at once confirmed and resolved doubts his generation had begun to express about the moral and material future of the nation. Bellamy clubs and publications advocating Bellamy's reformism sprang up throughout the United States, and his ideas were translated into legislative acts and party platforms. Looking Backward inspired a host of utopian and dystopian novels, and within a few years of its publication was the most widely familiar "socialist" work of its time.
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