Multatuli

Douwes Dekker spent nearly two decades as a colonial civil servant in the Dutch East Indies, rising to Assistant Resident of Lebak on Java, where he tried to prosecute local and Dutch officials for exploiting native coffee farmers under the forced-cultivation system. His superiors sided against him; he resigned in 1856, sailed home in debt and fury, and within four years had turned the whole affair into a novel.

Max Havelaar, published under the Latin pseudonym Multatuli ('I have suffered much') used a deliberately chaotic, satirical frame narrative to smuggle a documentary indictment of colonial abuse into a bestseller; it is widely credited with helping shift Dutch policy decades later. Dekker spent his remaining years abroad, chronically in debt, writing polemics and further fiction, and died in Germany in 1887.