author
Henry Pettit
1842–1921
An American architect with a novelist’s imagination, he helped shape the vast Main Exhibition Building for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and later turned to fiction. His best-known book, A Twentieth Century Idealist (1905), blends big ideas, social hopes, and utopian speculation.
1 Audiobook
A Twentieth Century Idealist
by Henry Pettit
About the author
Born in Philadelphia on December 23, 1842, he was the son of Robert and Laura Ellmaker Pettit. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania with the class of 1863, left before graduating, and later received an honorary M.S. from the university in 1877.
Pettit built his reputation as an architect and engineer in Philadelphia. He is especially remembered as co-designer, with Joseph M. Wilson, of the enormous Main Exhibition Building for the 1876 Centennial Exposition, one of the landmark structures of that world’s fair.
He also wrote fiction. Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes him as the author of A Twentieth Century Idealist (1905), a work that moves toward a lost-race utopia, showing the same taste for large-scale vision that marked his architectural career. He died on August 11, 1921.