The Atlantis Congressman

1831 Ignatius Donnelly, American Congressman and author of utopian and fortean literature, especially on Atlantis.

One of the most prominent 19th-Century Atlantist authors (he made his fortune with Atlantis: the Antediluvian World), Ignatius Donnelly (born Philadelphia, November 3, 1831) was an idiosyncratic and somewhat quixotic American Congressman whose writings, particularly the utopian sci-fi novel, Cæsar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, profoundly influenced the working class in pre-federation (1901) Australia.

On November 18, 1893, in the Worker, a radical magazine, a journalist called "Murphy" pilloried and compared Australian poet and author Henry Lawson to Donnelly for his blood-and-thunder political article, 'A Leader of the Future' (Worker, 1893).

Perhaps ironically, Donnelly died in Minneapolis on the first day of the century, January 1, 1901 (precisely 100 years before this Almanac was founded), the very day on which Australia’s federation took effect ...

Categories: utopia, henry+lawson