Graham, an 1890s radical pamphleteer, was a young man when he finally resorted to medication for his sleeplessness and fell into a deep rest. He wakes 2 hundred years later, still youthful, for an age of great marvels and scientific achievement-and a world whose strange underlying economy is that it is all his private residence. By inheritance and the compounding of interest, Graham the Sleeper is just about the singular, final owner of everything and it is revered as a leader, with a council that dictates to the world in his name.

This science fiction classic was called by Wells himself “probably one of the most ambitious of my books.” A stirringly prophetic novel, it envisioned traveling, advertising, television, bank, labor corporation, and totalitarianism, all within the framework of a thrilling personal adventure tale.