collection of short stories or sketches rather than a novel, was directly
responsible for convincing Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom in Russia.
And it was Abraham Lincoln, no less, who addressed Harriet Beecher
Stowe, when they met in late 1862, with the words: "So this is the little
lady who made this great war" (the American Civil War). Although
Lincoln probably did not mean his words to be taken at face value,
many politicians and historians in the years that followed independently
attributed to Uncle Tom's Cabin a major role in bringing about the war
and thereby hastening the abolition of slavery.

Ignazio Silone novel Fontamara ( 1933), the third work studied, is
remarkable not only for the fact that it is claimed to have played a sig-
nificant role in turning around the broadly favorable opinion of
Mussolini's Fascism still held by large numbers of political commenta-
tors in the United States and Europe in the early 1930s, but for having
achieved several more, distinct, politically significant receptions since its
first publication, including in Italy during the Second World War and
in Third World countries in the postwar period.

In the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich ( 1962), whose publication Khrushchev personally authorized
to further his discrediting of Stalin, it is not a question of the novel's
having achieved a specific reform (as Solzhenitsyn complained, the labor
camps continued to operate fairly much unchanged) but of its having
engaged in an extraordinarily dramatic way with the mechanisms of
power of a relatively closed political system.

I doubt that the publication of any previous work of narrative fiction
has engendered quite such immediate and dramatic reverberations on
the level of international relations as the fifth work I examine, Salman Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses ( 1988). Readers of this book will know of-
the street protests, resulting in deaths, in several cities in Muslim coun-
tries; the demonstrations by members of the Muslim immigrant com-
munities in Britain, Canada, and other western countries at which
copies of the book were burned; the repeated calls made to devout
Muslims by the Ayatollah Khomeini and, since his death, other Islamic
religious leaders to "execute" Rushdie for blasphemy; which were fol-
lowed, in turn, by counter-protests from western countries including the
temporary withdrawal from Teheran of the heads of diplomatic missions
of all the European Community countries; the killing of several indi-
viduals associated with translating, publishing, or defending the book,
and so on. (The story took further twists in 1993 with the bombing of

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