Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren) is commonly acknowledged as China’s leading writer of the twentieth century. His career as a writer is odd: his most famous works, two collections of short stories, were written when the author was in his late thirties and seem to have sprung from nowhere. They are supplemented by a short collection of prose poems; some other verses in classical form, uncollected during his lifetime; a re-writing in modern form of ancient legendary tales; autobiographical memoirs; translations of Russian and other fiction; a large number of satirical and polemical essays; and a respectable body of scholarly works on traditional Chinese fiction. A projected novel never came into being. Although all of his work is highly regarded, it is a small number of short stories written between 1918 and 1925...
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Citation: McDougall, Bonnie S.. "Lu Xun". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 September 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11737, accessed 14 December 2025.]
