Shen Congwen

From Free net encyclopedia

Shen Congwen (Template:Zh-cpw, originally named Shen Yuehuan) was born 28 December 1902 in Fenghuang, and died 10 May 1988 in Beijing. He was a voluminous Chinese writer of western influence who used vernacular style with classical techniques.

Shen was initially trained for a career in the military. He joined a regiment where he observed border fighting and the lives of the Miao tribesmen, which would later become the subject matter of his early short fiction stories. He began writing fiction in 1922 and wrote almost continually until 1949. He taught Chinese literature at various universities during the Second Sino-Japanese War out of monetary necessity.

He was an apolitical writer and in 1949 suffered a breakdown under the Thought Reform of the Communist regime. He recovered by 1955 but never wrote any more fiction. He was given a staffing post at the Peking Palace Museum about which he wrote a non-fiction work in 1957; later he also published a famous study of Chinese costume and dress, gleaned from his research while in the Museum.

Ch'ang ho (“The Long River”), written during the Sino-Japanese War, is generally considered the best of his long fiction. Ch'un-teng chi (“Lamp of Spring”) and Hei-feng chi (“Black Phoenix”) are his most important collections of short stories.

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