However, he eventually decided on a literary career, and with Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo and Tian Han he co-founded the Creation Society which promoted vernacular and modern literature.
[1] Zhang went on to pursue a successful career as a novelist, writing stories of torrid love triangles that were popular with audiences but panned by critics.
In an essay later collected in the volume Two Minds, Lu Xun wrote that Zhang's complete works could be distilled to a single symbol: a triangle.
His output of fiction slackened after the early 1930s, and by the middle of the decade he was mainly writing science books and doing translations from the Japanese.
During the early years of the People's Republic, Zhang taught geology in Shanghai and continued his translation and editing work.