[2][3] Mao was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and participated in a number of left-wing cultural movements during the 1920s and 1930s.

[2] In addition to novels, Mao Dun published a number of essays, scripts, theories, short stories, and novellas.

[2] He adopted the pen name "Mao Dun" (Chinese: 矛盾) to express the tension in the conflicting revolutionary ideology within China in the 1920s.

His father, Shen Yongxi (Chinese: 沈永錫) taught and designed the curriculum for his son, but he died when Mao Dun was ten.

Through learning from his parents, Mao Dun developed great interest in writing as well as reading during his childhood.

While Mao Dun was studying in secondary school in Hangzhou, extensive reading and strict writing skills training filled his life.

He read the Wen Xuan, Shishuo Xinyu, and a large number of classical novels, which influenced his writing style.

Mao Dun entered the three-year foundation school offered by Peking University in 1913, in which he studied Chinese and Western literature.

After graduation, Mao Dun soon got his first job in the English editing and translation sections of the Commercial Press, Shanghai branch.

At 24 years of age, Mao Dun was already renowned as a novelist by the community in general, and in 1920, he and a group of young writers took over the magazine Fiction Monthly,[5] to publish literature by western authors, such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Byron, Keats, and Shaw, and make new theories of literature better known.

Inspired by the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Mao Dun took part in the May Fourth Movement in China.

Many famous writers like Lu Xun, Xu Dishan, Bing Xin, Ye Shengtao, had their works published through it.

[1] It tells the story of a generation of young intellectuals caught up in the world of revolutionary fervor without a true understanding of the nature of social change.

His next major work was Rainbow (虹, 1929), which became famous for having no less than 70 main characters and numerous plot twists and turns.

In 1933 came his next work, Midnight, which gained great popularity, to a point that it was also published in French and English, and it allowed to develop a sense of revolutionary realism.

When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he became active in several committees and he worked as the Secretary and then the Minister of Culture for Mao Zedong until 1965.

In the 1970s he became an editor of a children's magazine, and began working on his memoirs, which were serialized in the Party publication, the quarterly Historical Materials on New literature (新文学史料), but he died on 27 March 1981, before he could finish it.

Although he suffered great pain from illness in his old age, he still kept writing his memoirs, called The Road I Walked (我走过的路).

[4] However, Mao had had a two-year long affair with Qin Dejun (秦德君) during his marriage, which is also believed to have effects on his novel Rainbow.

Between the 1920s and the 1930s, which was also the early period of Mao Dun's writing career, the female characters occurring in his works mostly were in identity of "New Woman", for instance, Mrs. Gui (桂阿姨) and Qionghua (琼华) in Wild Rose (野蔷薇, 1929), Ms. Mei (梅小姐) in Rainbow (虹, 1930).

[8] However, from the 1930s, the "New Woman" characters in Mao Dun's works started to be replaced by the females who were living in traditional Chinese family.