author
and socialist, most famous for his utopia
n novel, Looking Backward
, set in the year 2000. He was a very influential writer during the Gilded Age
of United States history.
Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts
. His father was Rufus King Bellamy (1816–1886), a Baptist
minister and a descendant of Joseph Bellamy
. His mother was Maria Louisa (Putnam) Bellamy, a Calvinist
. Her father, Benjamin Putnam, had also been a Baptist minister, but had to withdraw from the ministry in Salem
, Massachusetts
, following objections to him becoming a Freemason.
A sense of utter loneliness—loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness—enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge.
The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs.
But one thing it opened her eyes to, and made certain from the first instant of her new consciousness, namely, that since she loved him she could not keep her promise to marry him.
Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love each other as of old.
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.
Buying and selling is essentially antisocial.
The nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.