Gillette, King Camp
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1855-1932) US salesman and industrialist who partially invented and wholly made practicable the disposal safety razor, founding the company that now bears his name in 1901; his works as an author, sometimes as by King C Gillette, were universally focused on Utopian solutions to the dilemmas he saw infecting the rapidly expanding capitalist world, beginning with The Human Drift (1894), which advocates a socialist, pollution-free, non-competition-based America, whose 60,000,000 inhabitants are all housed in 36,000 apartment buildings evenly spaced throughout the one central City of Metropolis – which is located near Niagara Falls, not New York – with the rest of the continent empty except for farms. "World Corporation" (1910) and The People's Corporation (1924) with Upton Sinclair continue in semi-fictionalized form to argue for an umbrella corporation of worldwide scope, one of whose primary functions would be to protect ordinary citizens from the depredations of unregulated capitalism. [JC]
King Camp Gillette
born Fond du Lac, Wisconsin: 6 January 1855
died Los Angeles, California: 9 July 1932
works
- The Human Drift (Boston, Massachusetts: New Era, 1894) [hb/]
- The Ballot Box (Brookline, Massachusetts: no publisher given, 1897) [chap: pb/]
- "World Corporation" (Boston, Massachusetts: New England New Company, 1910) [hb/]
- The People's Corporation (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924) with Upton Sinclair [hb/]
links
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