Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, into an impoverished but educated gentry family. He received a tradITional education before he attended Jiangnan Naval Academy (1898-99) and School of Railway and Mines (1899-1902) in Nanjing. In 1902 went to Japan where he studied Japanese language and then medicine at Sendai Provincial Medical School. In 1906 he dropped out of the school to devote himself entirely to wrITing. He studied privately and returned in 1909 to China. In 1910-11 he was a teacher in Shaoxing. From 1912 to 1926 he held a post in the ministry of education in Beijing. He was Chinese lITerature instructor at National Beijing UniversITy (1920-26), and also taught at Xiamen (Amoy) UniversITy (1926) and UniversITy of Canton (1927).
He is a short-story wrITer, essayist, crITic, and lITerary theorist who is considered one of the greatest figures in the 20th-century Chinese lITerature. In the West Lu Xun is chiefly known for his stories, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Lu Xun's acclaimed short stories appeared in three collections between the years 1923 and 1935. He also produced sixteen volumes of essays, reminiscences, prose poetry, historical tales, some sixty classical-style poems, and a dozen volumes of scholarly research, and numerous translations.
The collected works of Lu Xun in twenty volumes was first published in 1938. Lu Xun's work is still widely read in China. In his lifetime Lu Xun managed to maintain his status as an independent but leftist artist, but since his death polITical factions have been slightly nervous about his legacy
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