The Fair Hope of Heaven

The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia

This new book expands on the material in Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, and brings it up to date with  more historical as well as contemporary stories. In The Fair Hope of Heaven you will meet the muckraking author Upton Sinclair, who spent a year in Fairhope in the early 20th century, legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, and local characters who entertained, amused and inspired the citizens of Fairhope for the past 100 years.

A Hundred Years After Utopia

The little settlement on the banks of Mobile Bay in Alabama must have seemed an unlikely experiment when the idea was first floated in the early 1890’s in Des Moines. There, a club made up of idealists who were committed to the institutionalization of social economist Henry George’s principles of single tax,  met frequently to discuss the validity of the theory and parse the ideas in George’s book Progress and Poverty...The club formally incorporated as the Fair Hope Industrial Association  while its utopian plan was still embryonic in Des Moines. The Association’s name, based on a remark that such an experiment had a “fair hope of success,” came to be the name they chose for the new settlement. The location was found by a committee assigned to that purpose, and chosen for its affordabilty and its potential.   From The Fair Hope of Heaven  

Buy the Book

The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia is available through amazon.com, Barnes & Noble online, and at the Page & Palette Bookstore in Fairhope, AL.