I think Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) wrote progressive novels. Huckleberry Finn, for one, certainly reads like a progressive novel to me. Most of the criticisms I've heard are nit-pickings about his use of the world "n-word" and Huck's relationship with the escaped slave Jim, but they key is that in the end Huck turns his back on his upbringing and refuses to turn Jim in, which was revolutionary for the time.
Pudd'nhead Wilson made the point that not only could a white man switched as a child with a light-skinned black baby be mistaken for a black man, but that a black man raised as a white could be just as much a scalawag as a white man raised as a black slave could be a good and gentle person. The moral was that people are basically the same, white or black.
I believe that Clemens was active in the Anti-Imperialist League and protested American adventures abroad. Late in his career he wrote a book of very sardonic stories (I believe the name was Letters from Earth). As I recall he attacked religion, patriotism, imperialism and other conceits of the Gilded Age.
-- Jim Cullen
---------------------------------------- THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST James M. Cullen, Editor P.O. Box 150517, Austin, Texas 78715-0517 Phone: 512-447-0455 Internet: populist at usa.net Home page: http://www.eden.com/~reporter ----------------------------------------