Born on March 26, 1850, in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, Edward Bellamy was the third son of a Baptist minister and a Calvinist mother. He came from a long line of New England families going back two centuries. His outspoken father, Reverend Rufus King Bellamy, and his well-educated mother, Maria Putnam, taught him the morality, work ethic, and social justice that marked his works. Although Bellamy would espouse no religious beliefs in later life, he maintained the tenets of optimism, humanitarianism, and sense of commitment that he learned in childhood.

Bellamy's birthplace was a mill town where he observed the disparity between the harshness of life for the laborers and the decadence of the wealthy. By age ten, he had started writing essays on social reform. At the age of seventeen, after failing to pass the physical examination for entrance into West Point, Bellamy took up studies at Union...