As Atwood reveals through her essays and interviews, The Handmaid's Tale is an outgrowth of the twentieth-century dystopian point of view. Unlike pre-twentieth-century dreamers, altruists, and sectarians — such as Bronson Alcott, Robert Owens, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Mary Baker Eddy, and Charles Fourier, who created perfect worlds on paper and launched experimental utopias (for example, Brooke Farm, Pennsylvania Dutch enclaves, Christian Scientists' Massachusetts Metaphysical College and Pleasant View Home, the pioneer beginnings of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the New Harmony and Oneida communes) — dystopian writers countered unbridled idealism with a worst-case perspective. George Orwell, master of the genre, wrote 1984 (1949), a nightmare novel set in London under a totalitarian regime where manipulative rewriters of history change facts to suit political exigency, manipulate language to serve the truth of the moment, and suborn party menials with threats, coercion, and subtle terrors. Orwell's brief beast fable, Animal Farm (1945), presents a similar controlled misery in miniature as the disgruntled animals on an English farm revolt and evolve a fascist pig-run police state, which is far worse than their former servitude to the human farmer.
Other anti-utopian classics from the twentieth century exhibit the doubts, fears, and discontent of notable dystopists: Ayn Rand (Anthem), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Karel Capek (R.U.R.), and Ray Bradbury ("There Will Come Soft Rains" and Fahrenheit 451).
