Shen Congwen (沈从文; 沈從文; 28 December 1902 – 10 May 1988), formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung-wen, was a Chinese writer. Born in the multiethnic region of western Hunan, Shen spent his early years roaming the frontier regions of southwestern China as a soldier and a tax collector. Following the New Culture Movement, he moved to Beijing and rose to prominence for his “native soil” literature featuring idyllic, ethnic cultures and colorful, underclass characters. In the 1930s, his advocacy of apolitical literature made him a target of attacks from left-wing writers. After the Communist takeover of Beijing in 1949, Shen attempted suicide. He subsequently abandoned literary writing under Communist rule, devoting the rest of his life to the study of historical artifacts and material culture. Shen was slated to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature but died before it could be awarded.
He was born Shen Yuehuan (沈岳焕; 沈岳煥) on 28 December 1902 in the town of Fenghuang (then known as Zhen'gan) in west Hunan Province. In late adolescence he chose the name Shen. He was the fourth of nine children born to Shen Zongsi, a Han-Miao, and Huang Suying, a Tujia. His grandfather, Shen Hongfu, was a local hero who became a decorated general before being named acting commander-in-chief of Guizhou province at the age of 25. Due in large part to his grandfather's fame and fortune, Shen was born into a relatively well-off household. Following the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, his father hoped to become elected to the provincial assembly, but was instead forced to go into hiding in Inner Mongolia after joining a failed plot to assassinate President Yuan Shikai. The fact of Shen's mother's Tujia ethnicity and his paternal grandmother's Miao ethnicity, he keep secret until the 1980s. Despite his multi-ethnic background, he considered himself as a Miao.
Owing to his father's sudden disappearance, the family fortunes gradually diminished. Most of their land was sold off, and in 1917, after graduating from primary school, Shen was made to leave home. He joined a local reserve militia before joining the regiment in Yuanling (then known as Chenzhou) working as a clerk.
Many early modern writers in China were well-educated, and some studied abroad, often in Japan. Shen, however, received a modest formal education. As a child he received private tutoring at home followed by a private family school. These private tutorials were conducted in an outdated, classical scholarly style which Shen criticized as neither useful nor interesting. In 1915, he began attending the Fenghuang town primary school, from which he graduated in 1917.
As a child he disliked school. In his autobiography, he describes frequently cutting class. According to Shen, this educational experience formed the foundation of his later professional and emotional life, "Having learned to use my eyes to take in everything in this world, to live amid all life, I found school unspeakably boring." This school-of-life brand of personal education is central to the image of Shen. Mo Yan, in his Nobel lecture given after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, compares himself to Shen, "I left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly lonely, and had no books to read. But for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, Shen, I had an early start on reading the great book of life. My experience of going to the marketplace to listen to a storyteller was but one page of that book."
In 1923, after serving five years in the militia in Hunan, Shen left for Beijing to pursue higher education. Having failed the university entrance exam, he pursued independent study while auditing classes at Peking University.
In 1949, he was attacked on big character posters at the Peking University campus for not heralding the Communist cause. Suffering from depression and social ostracization, he slit his wrists and throat with a razor blade.
On 22 December 1924, the Morning Supplement first published his essay An Unposted Letter (Chinese: 一封未曾付邮的信; pinyin: Yī fēng wèi céng fù yóu dē xìn). He began publishing short stories and essays regularly in Fiction Monthly and Crescent Moon, two highly influential literary magazines of the New Culture Movement. In 1925 Shen became a student of Professor Lin Zaiping, who introduced him to the famous modernist poet Xu Zhimo. In the 1930s he gained fame with his longer works such as Border Town and The Long River. In Beijing Shen met several influential figures of the New Culture Movement including Ding Ling and her husband Hu Yepin. He lived with the couple for some time before the three writers moved to Shanghai together in 1927.
In Shanghai, Shen, Ding and Hu edited a newspaper literary supplement called Red and Black and later The Human World Monthly, the literary supplement for the Human World Bookstore in Shanghai. In early 1929 the trio published the first edition of their own literary magazine called the Red and Black Monthly. At the time a philosophical battle was begun in the Shanghai literary scene concerning the proper role of writers and art in the forming of new Chinese society. On one side were the communists represented by the Creation Society whose slogan was changed to "Literature is the tool for class struggle!" Rival literary magazine The Torrent argued strongly against "proletarian revolutionary literature." The Crescent Moon Society was decidedly anti-political, and it is with this group that Shen found his literary philosophy fitted best.
By 1929, Shen, Ding, and Hu's publications had all failed while the political situation in Shanghai was increasingly hostile to writers not wholly allied with the Nationalists (KMT). Ding and Hu left for Jinan that year fearing that their political leanings would put them in danger if they stayed in Shanghai. As his two former partners began work at a high school in Jinan, Shen took a position as instructor of Chinese Literature and writer-in-residence at the Wusong Chinese Institute. Hu Shih president of the school and a founder of the Crescent Moon Society offered him the job, making a special exception for Shen who would normally not have been eligible for the position, lacking any academic degree. Hu Shi appreciated Shen's abilities, and Shen also joined the literati circle in Beijing.
In the fall of 1930, Shen moved to Wuchang where he taught a three-hour course at Wuhan University. In the spring of the following year, Shen returned to Hunan following the death of his father. Arriving back at the university in March, was too late for a reappointment and lost his teaching job there. He then taught at Qingdao University (renamed Shandong University in 1932) for two years before returning to Beijing. In 1933, Shen moved to Beijing with his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, and began work on his masterpiece, Border Town. The same year, he became the editor for the Art and Literature section of Tianjin's Da Gong Bao, one of the most influential magazines then.
After the Japanese invasion of 1937, Shen wrote little fiction. That year he fled Beijing, living for four months in Hunan in a city on the Yuan River, before finally fleeing to Kunming following the Japanese bombardment of Wuhan. In Kunming, he taught at National Southwestern Associated University.
The war ended in 1945 and Shen returned to Beijing in the summer of 1946. He taught at Peking University until 1949, when he was removed from his position in a political purge.
Shen was a particularly apolitical writer. In the early years of the People's Republic of China his resistance to the heavy politicization of the arts lead to him being publicly attacked in big character posters and subsequently to a mental breakdown. In early 1949, Shen drank kerosene and cut his throat and wrist in a suicide attempt. He never published another work of fiction, unable to write stories fitting the political requirements of the new regime.
In 1950, he began work at the Chinese Museum of History in Beijing, labelling artifacts and giving tours. His identity also began to change from a writer to a researcher of cultural relics, the main field is ancient Chinese costumes. During the cultural revolution, his job at the museum became a cleaning position, forcing him to spend his days scrubbing toilets. Shen was finally politically rehabilitated in 1978. That year, he left the museum for work with the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In this part of his career, after 1950, he published many academic writings on Chinese art history.