Although he later presided over pro-Japanese literary journals under pressure from the ruling Japanese, he undoubtedly remains an important figure in Korean modernism of the 1930s.

Choi was born on February 11, 1908, in Haeju, Hwanghae Province, Korea to wealthy parents, the only son in a family of four daughters.

[1] His father, Choi Kyung-tae, ran an orchard called Taeilwon, and became one of the richest men in the area.

After graduating, he entered the department of arts at Keijo Imperial University in April 1926 where he studied English Literature.

After completing his degree in 1931, he entered graduate school at the same university and studied under prominent professors including Kiyoshi Sato and Reginald Horace Blyth.

[4] Around this time, Choi started to focus on literary works, publishing his first book Literature and Intellect in June 1938.

[5] Choi participated in a pro-Japanese organization founded in 1939 for the purpose of state-run cooperation and served as a major executive in establishing a total mobilization system for Japanese wartime.

He was arrested and imprisoned under the Anti-National Punishment Act in September 1949, but his sentence was suspended due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

An elaboration on his doctoral thesis, Shakespeare's Art as Order of Life was published in the United States in the summer of 1963.

[17] Before Choi, the Korean literary circle was divided into two groups:[18] the Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation (KAPF), which focused tendency writing and politically inclined works that served to persuade readers to accept left-wing political and ideological tendencies; and a group of poets continuing the tradition of the national literature movement through creative writing.

In response, Choi wrote the paper "Theory of Satire" in which he lamented that "Korean literature is now at a dead end"[19] and pointed out the limitations of both tendency writing's social criticism and national literature's aesthetic criticism, ultimately merging the two to form his literary theory of intellectualism.

It comprises 19 articles, including works like the "Literary Theory of Modern Intellectualism" and "Criticism and Science", and 20 short reviews such as "The Negotiability and Honesty of Language" and "Tradition and Dogma".