Wu was a best-selling author in China and Taiwan, occasionally using his pen name Lu Ch'iao (literally, Deer Bridge).
In 1958 he published his first novel "Song Never to End" or "Never-ending Saga" (Wei yang ko or Weiyang ge), which focused on friendships among four young people during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
It has sold more than one million copies[citation needed] and in 1991 was voted most influential book of the 1950s by readers of the China Times, Taiwan's largest daily newspaper and ranked number 73 for 20th century Chinese novels.
[12] Lecturers have included (in order from 1998 to 2012) Richard Barnhart, Milo Beach, Nicole Coolidge Rousamaniere, Robert Mowry, Maxwell Hearn, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Timothy Clark, Lu Jie, Nancy Steinhardt, Jerome Silbergeld, and Andrew Watsky, Yukio Lippit, Jane Portal, Colin C. Mackenzie, and Vidya Dehejia.
[12] His home and bamboo grove in St. Louis which contains Nelson Wu's calligraphy of the Book of Changes (I Ching) handwritten covering the four walls of an entire room has been preserved.