Publisher's Synopsis
"Ryan McIlhenny's American Socialist recovers the largely forgotten history of Laurence Gronlund (1844-1899), the nation's most influential socialist. Gronlund cultivated a unique polemic against capitalism by adapting Marxism to the American context in the late nineteenth century. His works influenced prominent Gilded Age intellectuals in North America and those across the Atlantic. Acclaimed author Edward Bellamy, who incorporated key elements of Gronlund's cooperative socialism in Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), believed that "school children of the future would be taught to revere the name of Laurence Gronlund." Novelist William Dean Howells said that Gronlund was "a man to be read with respect, and his works cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to acquaint himself with the hopes and motives of a very intelligent body of men." In a letter written to Gronlund in 1890, Leo Tolstoy expressed high praise for the ideas espoused in
