In Nowhere and Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias Make History (1946), Morgan discussed the influence of Looking Backward on the shapers of Roosevelt's New Deal, especially on Adolf Berle, Jr., whose father was a friend and disciple of Bellamy. The engineer Arthur Ernest Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin Roosevelt, and for sixteen years president of Antioch University, thought so highly of Looking Backward that he wrote Bellamy's first biography. David Riesman, in his biography of Thorstein Veblen, told how Bellamy's utopia altered the lives of Veblen and his wife, and persuaded Veblen to shift his academic training from philosophy Vernon Parrington, in the third volume of Main Currents in American Thought, devoted fourteen pages to a sympathetic account of Looking Backward. Socialist leaders in England and Europe were also influenced by the book.

In an essay 'How I Became A Socialist,' Debs thanked Bellamy for 'helping me out of darkness into light.' The book left its mark on such American socialists and liberals as Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, John Dewey, Scott Nearing, Lincoln Steffens, Jack London, Charles Beard, Carl Sandburg, and Erich Fromm. Looking Backward had an enormous effect on Eugene Debs and the later American labor and political leaders who called themselves socialists.

The English poet and socialist William Morris was so infuriated by what he called Bellamy's 'horrible cockney dream' that he wrote News From Nowhere about a less regimented future society with more of an emphasis on crafts than on machinery.(1) Both books resemble Bellamy's in their replacement of unbridled capitalism by a moneyless socialist state.

William Dean Howells was so taken by Looking Backward that he wrote two utopia novels of his own, A Traveler from Altruria and Through the Eye of the Needle. About half of these books were utopias with such titles as Looking Ahead, Looking Beyond, Looking Within, Looking Forward, all even more preposterous than Bellamy's. Soon after its appearance in 1888, some hundred books were published either attacking Bellamy's vision of Boston in the year 2000 or defending it. In its endless reprintings, it has sold over a million copies and been translated into twenty languages. Looking Backward: 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) is far and away the most popular, most influential utopia novel ever written, and also one of the worst. No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.

Looking back edward bellamy