| Novel | Issue | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1851) |
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 extended slaveholders’ power into free states, intensifying national debate over the morality of slavery. | Although the story that Abraham Lincoln called Stowe the “little lady who made this big war” is apocryphal, the novel sold 300,000 copies in its first year. Frederick Douglass, who described the book as “a work of marvelous depth and power,” contributed to its popularity by repeatedly endorsing it in his newspaper. |
| Max Havelaar by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1860) |
Under “opium regime” policies, Dutch colonists encouraged widespread narcotics use among Indonesian coffee farmers in order to distract them from brutal working conditions and meager pay. | Written from the perspective of a disillusioned Dutch coffee trader, the novel was deemed by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer “the book that killed colonialism.” While at first it resulted only in the moderate reforms to Dutch rule known as the Ethical Policy, renewed readership in the 1940s inspired the leaders of the Indonesian revolution to take up arms. |
| Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877) |
The rise of the taxicab industry in London and other European cities resulted in horses being regularly and visibly mutilated, whipped, and worked to death. | Narrated by the titular horse, the novel questioned the morality of the everyday violence inflicted on working animals. One policy adviser to the Humane Society of the United States, pointing to a wave of animal-protection legislation passed in the years following its publication, called Black Beauty “the most influential anticruelty novel of all time.” |
| Sketches of Coolie Life by Ramkumar Vidyaratna (1888) |
A cornerstone of the colonial Indian economy, Assam tea plantations relied on an exploitative system of indentured “coolie” labor. | Hailed by Indian nationalists as their Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book provoked death threats against its author from both white planters and Indian agents employed by tea companies. Some historians have argued, however, that the indenture system ended not out of public pressure but because free labor became more profitable. |
| The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1905) |
Chicago’s unregulated slaughterhouses were hotbeds of foodborne disease, and their largely immigrant employees were vulnerable to workplace injury and abuse. | The novel’s gruesome evocations convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to order federal investigations, which led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Legislation aimed at improving working conditions was not proposed, however. A disappointed Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” |
| The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) |
The effects of years of improper land management and overcultivation uprooted thousands of Dust Bowl farmers at the height of the Great Depression. | First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1940 would testify in congressional hearings about migrant labor, wrote that the novel, about an Oklahoma family’s brutal journey into poverty, “both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.” |
