[1] The fact that his father defected dramatically affected his life, as he was seen and treated as "the son of a political offender", and was "passed around among relatives [8] He dropped out of the College of Education of Seoul National University in 1970.

[7] Finally in 1977, one of his short stories received honorable mention in literary awards given by Daegu Maeil Newspaper, after which he adopted the name Yi Mun-yol.

[1] He also has close ties to Gwangsan Literature Research Institute, in Dudeul Village (his hometown in Yeongyang county) and was instrumental in establishing its library which contains 20,000 books.

The first tendency is utilization of an allegorical view of Korean society, one that traces the ways in which various lives (recent, historical and in legend) are shaped and governed by dominant ideology and power, including, in particular, the tension between authoritarianism and liberalism (exemplified by Son of Man[10] and Our Twisted Hero [11]) and between traditionalism and modernism (exemplified by The Golden Phoenix[12] and The Old Hatter[13]).

The first aspect of this tendency has been described as an emphasis on the adverse consequences of "reckless faith in ideology, belief or theories which people often cling to in the context of history, religion and academic studies".

[7] The second tendency is a focus on his internal world, fictionalizing his experience of growing up and the process by which his worldview was formed (exemplified by his epic novel Border and the short story Appointment with My Brother).

The Poet, The Golden Phoenix and Bisson), historical depictions (e.g. Age of Heroes and Border), romantic love stories (e.g. Lette's Song and All That Falls Has Wings), characterizations of political views unconsciously internalized in Korean society, especially men in Korea, (e.g.

[16] One of Yi's best selling novels Son of Man (approximately 2 million copies sold) is simultaneously a detective story and a treatise of his views on Jewish and Christian ideologies derived from a study of comparative religion and mythology.

[3] Son of Man explores the theme of the complex relationship between God and humanity through the eyes of two characters who are doubtful of the Jewish and Christian worldviews.

In the first half of the story, Ahasuerus leaves his home in Judea and embarks on a quest to understand the meanings of religious ideologies from across the ancient world.

As described in a Korean Literature Now review, his travels to the centers of religious thought lead him to conclude that all were the product of "political intrigue and the base desires of a frightened populace"[17] In the second half of the story, he returns to his homeland.

In an interview that was conducted while that revision was underway, Yi stated that when the original book was published, the Korean public had very little knowledge of comparative religion and he believed that his work helped to fill that void.

Brother Antony, a translator of this work, noted that Garuda is a mythical man-bird with golden wings which first evolved in Indian mythology.

[citation needed] In The Old Hatter, (translated into English by Brother Anthony) young boys play pranks on the last traditional artisan in their village.

[24] Michelle Tanenbaum, in a review of the influence of Cervantes' Don Quixote on Korean literature concluded that Yi's Hail to the Emperor!

[25] Sol Sun-bung, author of the preface to his English translation, noted that although Emperor's dream of becoming a ruler of the people failed in a practical sense, nonetheless at his death, he achieves "greater eminence by transcending all worldly preoccupations".

Prior to the election, the sixth grade teacher hands out copies of U.S. President Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, a symbol of an idealized liberal democratic system.

As described in a scholarly review by Jini Kim Watson, he "feels as if 'I had been thrown into a cruel kingdom that ran things as it wished'.

In the coda, corruption, lack of freedom, and the arbitrary rule of hypocrites turn out to better describe the normative conditions of the postcolonial nation under globalized post-Fordism."

He went on to comment that after Chun Doo-hwan (military strongman) became the president of South Korea (1980), there was an understanding for intellectuals that if they stayed quiet, they wouldn't be punished.

[30]  A similar circumstance was depicted in Our Twisted Hero in which the protagonist (Yi's alter ego) refuses to denounce the bully student monitor with whom he was forced to become aligned.

When asked how he kept his composure he pointed to a pig that was happily eating as if nothing were amiss and said "that this is the unperturbed way a wise man should live in all situations"[31] In a critique of the novel included in the afterword of the bilingual edition (Korean and English), Bak Choel-hwa considered the work an allegory depicting the dark side of Korean society and commented that if Hong is the "pig" then the protagonist is "a member of the powerless educated class, a "Pilon" who makes no attempt to stop the madness".

In a story well known to Koreans, he had entered a poetry contest without acknowledging (or in other accounts without knowing) his true identity, wrote a poem critical of his grandfather and was declared the winner.

A chance encounter with a Taoist poet known as the Old Drunkard leads to a transformation described by Brother Anthony, as a vision that "poetry has nothing at all to do with words, techniques, or themes, but with being".

[36] Peter Lee noted that this imagery is recurrent in Korean poetry and represents the highest praise for a poet-recluse in a Buddhist or Taoist context.

After the protagonist learns that his father has died after a 40-year separation, he makes an appointment to meet his North Korean half-brother and discovers that, despite their ideological differences, they have strong family ties.

[43] In addition to original works, Yi did large multivolume Korean adaptations of classic Chinese novels including Romance of the Three Kingdoms ,Outlaws of the Marsh and Legends of Chu and Han.

This association was broken in 2020 when another publishing company, RH Korea, began to reissue some of his work including Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Son of Man.

[citation needed] His book Homo Executans (2006) included a boiler mechanic, who claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus, and a Mary Magdalen figure who worshiped him.

[47] In 2011, Yi Mun-yol was also the first Korean fiction writer to have a story appear in The New Yorker ("An Anonymous Island", translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl).