Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author famous for his popular novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. He was born in Chicopee, Massachusetts to a family with deep Baptist roots; his father was a Baptist minister and his mother the daughter of well-known Baptist minister. He attended Union College briefly, spent a year in Europe, and then took a stab at the law before becoming a journalist with the New York Post and the Springfield Union. He contracted tuberculosis at age 25, and abandoned journalism for the less demanding work of a writer.  He published three rather ordinary novels before Looking Backward: 2007-1887 caught fire and brought him a measure of fame and fortune, selling 200,000 copies in the first year alone. The book sparked “Nationalist Clubs” all over and the emergence of a “People’s Party” that Bellamy helped promote by founding The New Nation magazine in 1891. The magazine ran out of money and folded in 1894, whereupon Bellamy abandoned politics and returned to writing, publishing Equality, a sequel to Looking Backward, in 1897, before his death from tuberculosis in 1898.