In 1981, a new company, Hasta Mitra, founded by three men just released from over a decade in prison under a dictatorship, published a novel written in a prison camp by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The novel was This Earth of Mankind. This book tells of these men’s struggle, from the moment of their arrests, through the prison experience, including the story of the writing of Pramoedya’s novels in Buru Island prison camp. It tells of their return from exile into a different Indonesia, with its radical past suppressed. Returning from exile, they explode on to the scene with Pramoedya’s epic of the time when the conditions were just forming for the idea of creating such a country as Indonesia to emerge. The new creation story in Pramoedya’s novels as well as Hasta Mitra’s own struggle to publish those novels in the face of repression inspired a new generation of youth, who succeeded in breaking the dictatorship.