Kim Man-Jung

(pseudonym, Sopo). Born 1637 in Seoul; died July 14, 1692, in Namwon. Korean writer, scholar, and official.

Kim Man-jung occupied high positions in the feudal bureaucracy and was close to the Sirhak, or Pragmatic, school of thought. In his collection The Literary Sketches of Sopo, he criticized the imitation of Chinese culture and advocated the development of indigenous literary traditions using the vernacular. In his tale of everyday life Lady Sa’s Wanderings in the South and in the novel The Cloud Dream of the Nine (Russian translation, 1961), he depicted the liberation of the individual from Confucian morality. His last work, Biography of Lady Chong (1690), was written on the occasion of the death of his mother, who had fostered in him a love of literature.