Mao Dun’s Works
2 min readMao Dun’s Works
Mao Dun’s（1896-1981）works opened a new literary period.His novels，based on close observation and analysis of society，reproduce a whole picture of life of that time.
Mao Dun is not only an active participant in literary revolution，but also a practitioner of social revolution.He was one of the first modern writers to accept Marxist theories.After the failure of the National Revolution，he fell into a state of pain and contradiction，and had to rethink the future of the Chinese society and of the direction of individuals.
The most popular work of Mao Dun is Midnight，published in 1933.With Shanghai as its backdrop，the novel describes the complex contradictions and struggles between all forces of the society，and successfully portrays a typical national capitalist named Wu Sunfu. Wu is a shrewd，iron-fisted person cherishing ideals of development of national industry；thus his failure not only takes on a tragic hue，but also indicates the doomed fate of the national capitalist class under the ages of a semi-colony.
In order to truthfully reflect the situation of the Chinese society，Mao Dun had collected and studied many documents and material about the financial community of Shanghai.This is the reason why Ye Shengtao said that Mao Dun wrote Midnight with “the spirit of both a writer and a scientist.”
Mao Dun’s novels have likewise given us a chronicle of the Chinese society in the first half of the 20th century.
