Moving the Mountain

A man lost in Tibet for thirty years comes home to an America that has fixed everything — work, housing, food, the position of women — and has to be persuaded that it is not a trick. Charlotte Perkins Gilman published this utopia in 1911, four years before "Herland", and made the reform economic rather than biological. The interest is in what she thought could be changed in one generation. Sixty plates of city life by John Sloan and Paul Klee, from Greenwich Village rooftops to Berlin streets, picture the urban world Gilman's hero must learn to see anew.