Edward Bellamy House
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
The Greek Revival house on Church Street in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts is where journalist Edward Bellamy grew up, returned to write, and died. In eighteen eighty-eight, working in his father's study in this house, Bellamy published Looking Backward, a utopian novel in which a Boston man falls asleep in the eighteen eighties and wakes in the year two thousand to find inequality abolished, labor organized by the state, and everyone paid equal wages. The book sold two hundred thousand copies before the end of the century, ranking as the third best-selling American novel of the eighteen hundreds, behind only Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur.
It inspired hundreds of Nationalist Clubs across the country and directly influenced progressive movements for decades. Bellamy died here in eighteen ninety-eight at forty-eight, his health long broken by tuberculosis. The house is a National Historic Landmark.
