Three Hundred Years Hence

Three Hundred Years Hence is a utopian science fiction novel by author Mary Griffith. It is the first known utopian novel written by an American woman. The novel was originally published in 1836 as part of Griffith's collection, Camperdown, or News from Our Neighborhood. The novel concerns a hero who falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the Utopian states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Writers of utopian fiction generally need to set their imagined societies either in a remote place (as in Sir Thomas More's original Utopia and many imitators), or in a different time. Griffith was the earliest American writer to project her protagonist into the future to encounter a vastly improved social order.