The American author and socialist Edward Bellamy (1850 – 1898) briefly studied law before giving it up and becoming a journalist, then novelist.
Although he is not widely known to modern audiences, at the end of the 19th century his utopian novel Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 (1888) had outsold every American novel except for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Bellamy’s cousin, Francis Bellamy wrote The Pledge of Allegiance, published in 1892.