Lu Xun

(born Sept. 25, 1881, Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, China—died Oct. 19, 1936, Shanghai) Chinese writer. He became associated with the nascent Chinese literary movement in 1918 (part of the larger May Fourth Movement), when he published his short story “Diary of a Madman,” a condemnation of traditional Confucian culture and the first Western-style story written wholly in Chinese. Though best known for his fiction, he was also a master of the prose essay, a vehicle he used especially late in life. He never joined the Communist Party himself, but he recruited many of his countrymen to communism and came to be considered a revolutionary hero.