Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers.

[2] He was born Shen Yuehuan (沈岳煥) on 28 December 1902 in the town of Fenghuang (then known as Zhen'gan) in west Hunan Province.

[3] His grandfather, Shen Hongfu, was a local hero who became a decorated general before being named acting commander-in-chief of Guizhou province at the age of 25.

Due in large part to his grandfather's fame and fortune, Shen Congwen was born into a relatively well-off household.

Following the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, his father hoped to become elected to the provincial assembly, but was instead forced to go into hiding in Inner Mongolia after joining a failed plot to assassinate President Yuan Shikai.

But for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, Shen Congwen, I had an early start on reading the great book of life.

[8] On 22 December 1924, the Morning Supplement first published his essay An Unposted Letter (Chinese: 一封未曾付邮的信; pinyin: Yī fēng wèi céng fù yóu dē xìn).

[15] He began publishing short stories and essays regularly in Fiction Monthly and Crescent Moon, two highly influential literary magazines of the New Culture Movement.

In 1925 Shen became a student of Professor Lin Zaiping, who introduced him to the famous modernist poet Xu Zhimo.

[17] In Beijing Shen Congwen met several influential figures of the New Culture Movement including Ding Ling and her husband Hu Yepin.

At the time a philosophical battle was begun in the Shanghai literary scene concerning the proper role of writers and art in the forming of new Chinese society.

On one side were the communists represented by the Creation Society whose slogan was changed to "Literature is the tool for class struggle!"

The Crescent Moon Society was decidedly anti-political, and it is with this group that Shen Congwen found his literary philosophy fitted best.

[19] By 1929, Shen, Ding, and Hu's publications had all failed while the political situation in Shanghai was increasingly hostile to writers not wholly allied with the Nationalists (KMT).

Ding and Hu left for Jinan that year fearing that their political leanings would put them in danger if they stayed in Shanghai.

[20] Hu Shih president of the school and a founder of the Crescent Moon Society offered him the job, making a special exception for Shen who would normally not have been eligible for the position, lacking any academic degree.

In 1933, Shen moved to Beijing with his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, and began work on his masterpiece, Border Town.

[26] In the early years of the People's Republic of China his resistance to the heavy politicization of the arts lead to him being publicly attacked in big character posters and subsequently to a mental breakdown.

[29] His identity also began to change from a writer to a researcher of cultural relics, the main field is ancient Chinese costumes.

During the cultural revolution, his job at the museum became a cleaning position, forcing him to spend his days scrubbing toilets.

[35] Jeffrey Kinkley nominated Shen for the prize first in 1980 after returning from a trip to China where he interviewed the aging writer.

His apolitical stance[22] brought abuses and taunts that in turn made him depressed, and he moved to a nursing home without Zhang Zhaohe, with whom he maintained a written relationship.

It was only when Zhang Zhaohe was sorting out his writings that she realized her lack of understanding of Shen Congwen and understood the hardship he had suffered.

[8] The New York Times published a detailed, paragraphs-long obituary describing him as "a novelist, short-story writer, lyricist and passionate champion of literary and intellectual independence".

His early work includes lyric poems, one-act dramas, essays, and short stories written in a unique and varied style borrowing from regional language, naturalistic spoken dialogue, classical Chinese forms, and Western literary influences.

[42][43] Two major thematic focal points of his early writing include military excesses and abuses in the country which he witnessed first-hand and the vanity of the urban bourgeoisie.

[2] My Education (Chinese: 我的教育; pinyin: Wǒ de jiàoyù), a short personal narrative written in the summer of 1929, is exemplary of Shen's many stories about his experiences with the militia.

[44] Shen Congwen's style of creation tends to romanticism, and he demands the poetic effect of the novel, which combines realism and symbolism together.

[49] His 1929 short story Xiaoxiao (萧萧), about the life of a child bride in rural west Hunan was first published in Fiction Monthly.

[53] Long River (Chinese: 长河; pinyin: Cháng hé), written during the Sino-Japanese War, is considered [by whom?]