SHEN TS'UNG-WEN

born Dec. 28, 1902, Feng-huang, Hunan province, China died May 10, 1988, Peking Pinyin Shen Congwen, original name Shen Yeh-huan, Pinyin Shen Yuehuan Chinese author of more than 35 volumes of fiction dealing with the struggles and triumphs of ordinary people in rural China. Trained for a military career, Shen Ts'ung-wen joined a regiment in Yan-ling, where he spent the next few years adding to his scanty education and observing the border fighting and the lives of the local Miao tribesmen, which later became the subject matter of his earliest successful short stories. Shen Ts'ung-wen began writing fiction in 1922, when he arrived in Peking, and from then until 1949 he rarely stopped writing, producing a tremendous number of novels and short stories of varying quality. He revised extensively, an unusual practice for a modern Chinese author. During the Sino-Japanese War (193745) Shen Ts'ung-wen, out of economic necessity, also taught Chinese literature at a number of universities. After the Communists triumphed in 1949, the basically apolitical writer came under attack and suffered a breakdown under the pressure of thought reform. He managed a recovery by 1955 and was placed on the staff of the Palace Museum in Peking, about which he wrote a work of nonfiction (1957). After 1949, however, he produced no fiction. Shen Ts'ung-wen was greatly influenced by the works of Western authors that he had read in translation; the influence was apparent in his loose, vernacular style. His techniques, however, were derived from classical Chinese literature. Of Shen Ts'ung-wen's longer works of fiction, Ch'ang ho (The Long River), written during the Sino-Japanese War, is generally considered his best. Ch'un-teng chi (Lamp of Spring) and Hei-feng chi (Black Phoenix) are his most important collections of short stories. Fourteen stories appeared in The Chinese Earth (1947).