On October 19, 1936, Lu Xun died at his home in Shanghai at the age of 55. He had suffered from tuberculosis for years, and his health had declined through 1936, and he kept working until shortly before the end. The illness was long. He was the best known Chinese writer of his generation and one of the founders of modern Chinese literature. His real name was Zhou Shuren.
He was born in Shaoxing in Zhejiang in 1881 and went to Japan to study medicine, and he later said that he gave up the laboratory after seeing a news film in which Chinese spectators watched the execution of a countryman without reacting, and decided that the illness to be treated was in the mind rather than the body. He began to write fiction in 1918 with The Diary of a Madman, which was published in the magazine New Youth and was the first modern Chinese story written in the spoken language rather than the classical style. The True Story of Ah Q followed in 1921 and 1922.
His output was wide. He wrote two collections of stories, a set of prose poems called Wild Grass, and a large number of essays and polemics, and he also translated from Japanese, Russian and German and edited journals and illustrated books. After the killings of 1927 he moved to Shanghai and worked there for the last nine years of his life. He argued with many people. He was a sharp critic of the old order and of writers he thought were dishonest.
His funeral on October 22 drew a large crowd through the streets of Shanghai, and the coffin was covered with a banner reading, in three characters, that the nation had lost a soul. He was buried at the Wan Guo cemetery and later reburied. His essays and stories are read in Chinese schools, and a museum and a park in Shanghai are named after him. Collections of his work continue to be published.