Table of Contents

Early Youth
Schooling
Teaching And Public Office
The Shanghai Decade
Works
Family and Social Life

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Following the success of The Diary of a Madman, Lu continued publishingshort stories and experimenting with new literary styles, always striving to de-scribe society in vivid, critical detail. He combined foreign and traditional Chinese literary and non-literary techniques in creative ways. For example, he inno-vated a literary mode of character description based on "line drawing", a tech-nique frequently employed in ancient Chinese painting where the outline of a fig-ure was suggestively sketched with only a few strokes. Thus Lu's readers foundthemselves encountering at once both modern reality, as well as rediscoveringthe richness of traditional Chinese art and literature. Thematically, Lu Xun's worksoften explored perceptions of Chinese national characteristics, as in his novella,The True story of Ah Q, which offered satirical crosshatching of Chinese historyand contemporary foreign perceptions of the Chinese spirit. Such blending shockedand challenged readers during the early 20th century, and Lu Xun quickly gainedfame as an author.

Preface
An interesting phenomenon of the last several decades isthe regularity of the following scenario: a non-Chinese studentsets out to learn something about modern Chinese literature,and almost invariably Lu Xun has been the first writer that heor she is assigned to read. Lu Xun is commonly known as thefather of modern Chinese literature, and his works such as TheTrue Story of Ah Q, have been regarded as the canon ofChinese culture.
In 1934, Feng Xuefeng, a senior Communist, reported toMao Zedong that a Japanese writer had stated that incontemporary China there were but two and a half men whotruly understood the spirit of their nation: the first two were LuXun and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, while the half wasthe ascendant Communist leader, Mao Zedong. In response,Mao smiled and said that the Japanese commentator was rightin his evaluation of Lu Xun. In retrospect, Mao' s quip of thisapocryphal scene holds more than a little truth: today, Lu Xun' sbroad corpus of work provides readers with an encyclopedicrecord of early 20th century Chinese social life and nationalsentiment.