[3] Multatuli’s father, Engel Douwes Dekker, worked as a sea captain from the Zaan district of North Holland.

[4] Engel inherited the surnames of both his parents, Pieter Douwes and Engeltje Dekker, and Multatuli’s family retained both names.

[7] In 1838, he left on one of his father's ships for Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, where over the next two decades he held a series of colonial government posts.

[1][2][3] Initially employed in the general accounting department,[3] he was promoted in the following years to administrative officer, although he disliked financial work.

[3] In 1842, he was appointed comptroller of the troubled district of Natal, Noord Sumatra, Dutch East Indies (now part of Indonesia).

[9][10] Financial irregularities and a deficit in funds – at least some of which dated to before his time in office – led to a serious reprimand from the governor of Sumatra's west coastal region, General Andreas Victor Michiels, and to a temporary suspension.

Here his career recovered, at least in part because the Resident, Reinier Scherius, shared his strong sense of fair play towards the indigenous population.

The government decided otherwise; Multatuli had again amassed a deficit in the official funds and had also run up private debts, a situation that raised suspicions of financial irregularities but was never cleared up.

[2] Determined to expose the scandals he had witnessed during his years in the Dutch East Indies, Douwes Dekker began to write newspaper articles and pamphlets.

Little notice was taken of these early publications until, in 1860, he published his satirical anticolonialist novel Max Havelaar: The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company under the pseudonym Multatuli.

[11] Douwes Dekker's pen name is derived from the Latin phrase multa tuli, meaning "I have suffered much" (or more literally: "I have borne much").

Although Douwes Dekker's friend and fellow writer Jacob van Lennep had seen to it that identifiable place names were changed before publication, the book still caused enormous controversy.

His misleadingly titled second book, Minnebrieven (Love Letters, 1861), is actually another mordant satire, this time in the form of a fictitious correspondence.

[1] The following year, he began to publish a wide range of miscellaneous writings in a series of uniform volumes called Ideën (Ideas), of which seven appeared between 1862 and 1877.

One of his plays, Vorstenschool (The School for Princes, published in 1872 in the fourth volume of Ideën), expresses his nonconformist views on politics, society, and religion.

Multatuli eventually separated from his wife, in large part due to his gambling addiction and related financial problems.