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This novel from popular nineteenth-century American author William Dean Howells features a visitor from a mysterious distant island known as Altruria. The contrast between the utopian island community and conditions in 1890s America provides remarkable insight into the social and cultural issues facing the country then -- and now. A must-read for fans of utopian fantasy and science fiction. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.
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I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him. It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the clerk tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him.
Reproduction of the original: A Traveller From Altruria by William Dean Howells
Set during the early 1890s in a fashionable summer resort somewhere on the East Coast of the United States, A Traveler from Altruria is narrated by a Mr Twelvemough, a popular author of light fiction who has been selected to function as host to a visitor from the faraway island of Altruria called Mr Homos. In the novel, the island state of Altruria serves as a foil to America, whose citizens, compared to Altrurians, appear selfish, obsessed with money, and emotionally imbalanced. Mainly, A Traveler from Altruria is a critique of unfettered capitalism and its consequences, and of the Gilded Age in particular._x000D_ Through the Eye of the Needle is a Utopian novel that follows A Traveler from Altruria. Howells casts this book in the form of an epistolary novel — a form favored by some other Utopian and dystopian writers. Aristides Homos, Howells's Altrurian protagonist, writes a series of letters home to his friend Cyril. Homos is now located in the densely urban environment of New York City, where he confronts the contrasts between America c. 1900 and his own pastoral and agrarian Utopianism in their most extreme forms. The dramatic center of the book is the love affair between Homos and Evelith Strange, a wealthy widow of the American plutocracy._x000D_ William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day", and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel.
A Traveler from Altruria by William Dean Howells. Originally published in instalments in Cosmopolitan, this piece of utopian fiction by William Dean Howells delivers a vision of a "one-class" socialist utopia while at once offering a biting critique of unfettered capitalism. The story centres around a visit to America of Mr Homos, a citizen of a mysterious island called Altruria, which is home to a one-class socialist Christian society, with no monetary system and no concept of the rich and poor. In the course of Mr Homos' visit he is appalled by what he sees occurring in late-19th-century America, a society which he likens to his country's own before "Evolution." He is clearly confused by the class system, continuously embarrassing his hosts - carrying his own luggage, bowing to waitresses, and other such acts - and finds certain activities simply bizarre, for example exercise for its own sake: To us, exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should - if you will excuse my saying so - look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral. In Altruria, all people are guaranteed a share of the national product on the condition they work at least three hours a day. In 1894, the year in which Howells' story was published, the fiction attempted to become reality when a Unitarian minister Edward Biron Payne - inspired by the Christian socialist principles espoused by Howells' book - founded "Altruria," a community in Sonoma County, California, which he set up with thirty of his followers. A hotel was started, and orchards provided fruit sold to a shop in Berkeley owned by Job Harriman (who himself set up the commune of Llano del Rio in 1913). Unfortunately, "Altruria" ran into unsurmountable financial troubles and it was abandoned in 1896. Howells would go on though, eventually creating an Altrurian trilogy, with the publication of Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).