SOURCE: Bellamy, Edward. “How I Wrote Looking Backward.” In Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! Articles—Public Addresses—Lectures, pp. 217-28. Kansas City, Mo: The Peerage Press, 1937.

In the following essay, originally published in the Ladies Home Journal in April 1894, Bellamy explains how he formulated his ideas about social reform and why he chose the novel form to express these ideas.

Up to the age of eighteen I had lived almost continually in a thriving village of New England, where there were no very rich and very few poor, and everybody who was willing to work was sure of a fair living. At that time I visited Europe and spent a year there in travel and study. It was in the great cities of England, Europe, and among the hovels of the peasantry that my eyes were first fully opened to the extent and consequences of man's inhumanity to man...