Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

Julian West is an insomniac who employs a mesmerist to help him sleep. He wakes after a long sleep of more than one hundred years to find himself in a society where hunger, crime, disease, and poverty have been eliminated. He spends time in the future and is schooled in the changes. He reawakens in the nineteenth century with a new outlook on the problems in his own time. Looking Backward, by critiquing nineteenth-century American values and institutions, had an enormous impact at the time of its publication.

About the Series:

Novel/Drama curriculum units contain complete lesson plans with preliminary and follow-up work, teacher notes with plot summary, background, and rationale, ready-to-use worksheets, and suggested answers for student questions. These study guides encourage the development of thinking, reading, speaking, research, and writing skills as well as critical thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.