I'm not sure why this should be, but some of the most successful recent books of social engagement often come from abroad. I think of J.M. Coetzee's stirring anti-apartheid novels, "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life and Times of Michael K," both story-driven and both set in an unfamiliar landscape that  seems to materialize out of a dream--or a nightmare--of his country of origin,  South Africa. Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," in contrast, is very specific as to setting, but the political point emerges from the trials of the protagonist and the deprivation he suffers, with only a mention of the regime that exiled him to a Siberian labor camp. It is the force of the fiction that brings the injustice to the fore, rather than the other way round. To my mind, though, perhaps the most powerful piece of protest writing in our time comes from an American playwright, Arthur Miller. I can never see a production of "The Crucible" without soaring on the genius of his conception.  Here, on the face of it, is a wrenching drama about accusations of witchcraft in
Puritan Massachusetts, and yet it was written and produced in 1953, in the midst of the contemporary witch hunt that was the McCarthy hearings. Intolerance, prejudice and the heavy boot of authority are obscene in any age, and Miller's genius was not so much in creating an allegory as a daring and inescapable parallel. He knew what I know: Let the story speak for itself.
                                                                                      * * *