Writers › Writer / Poet
Lin Yutang
Writer and linguist from Fujian who founded humour magazines in 1930s Shanghai and wrote My Country and My People and Moment in Peking in English
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as He Le
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Lin Yutang, first named Hele and later Yutang, came from Longxi in Fujian and was born in 1895 at Banzai in Pinghe, the son of a Christian pastor. He graduated from St John's University in Shanghai in 1916, studied at Harvard, and took a doctorate in linguistics at Leipzig in 1923. From 1932 he founded the Shanghai magazines Lunyu, Renjian shi and Yuzhou feng, which promoted humour and the light personal essay. In 1935 he published My Country and My People in English, followed in 1939 by the novel Moment in Peking, and he lived mostly in the United States, where in 1947 he built the Mingkuai Chinese typewriter. He settled in Taipei in 1966; his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage was published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1972. He died in Hong Kong in March 1976 and was buried at his house on Yangmingshan in Taipei.
Life and times
Dates 1895 CE–1976 CE