The extraordinary story of the writer who defied imprisonment, censorship, and dictatorship to create one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century. Imprisoned without trial after Indonesia's 1965 military coup, Pramoedya Ananta Toer spent fourteen years in prison and forced labor, where he was forbidden to write and stripped of nearly everything except his memory. Yet under impossible conditions, he secretly composed the stories that would become the celebrated Buru Quartet, preserving them through oral storytelling before smuggling the manuscripts beyond the reach of the dictatorship. In Memory of This Earth, Joel Whitney recounts Toer's remarkable struggle against censorship, political repression, and historical erasure. Drawing on the history of Indonesia's anti-communist purges, international human rights campaigns, and Toer's own literary resistance, Whitney reveals how one writer transformed imprisonment into an act of cultural and political defiance. A powerful work of literary history and political biography, Memory of This Earth restores Pramoedya Ananta Toer to his rightful place among the essential writers--and greatest defenders of artistic freedom--of the modern era.