Caesar's Column

Caesar's Column

Title page of the first edition.
Author	Ignatius L. Donnelly (as "Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D.")
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Apocalyptic fiction Science fiction Speculative fiction Utopian and dystopian fiction
Publisher	F. J. Shulte & Co.
Publication date	1890
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	367

Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century is a novel by Ignatius Donnelly, famous as the author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Caesar's Column was published pseudonymously in 1890. The book has been variously categorized as science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, and/or apocalyptic fiction; one critic has termed it an "Apocalyptic Utopia."

The book is also a political novel, and a romance. It was a popular success as well, selling 60,000 copies upon its initial publication. Its sales eventually comprised 250,000 copies. Donnelly's novel was one element of the great wave of utopian and dystopian literature during the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth, exemplified by works like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Jack London's The Iron Heel.

Caesar's Column is partly based on Donnelly's commitment to agrarian Populism. In 1892, two years after the publication of his novel, Donnelly drafted the platform of the Populist Party, in which he wrote,

This is the world view of Caesar's Column: a man comes from his rural environment to the heart of a brutal capitalist oligarchy; he sees its corruptions firsthand, and witnesses its destruction.

Donnelly's novel partly concerns the debated question of the alleged anti-Semitism of the Populist movement. Donnelly's villain is an Italian Jew — but his protagonist has a name, Weltstein, that must have suggested a Jewish identity to many readers.