Nam Cao

(pseudonym of Tran-Huu-Tri), Born Oct. 29, 1916; died Nov. 30, 1951. Vietnamese writer. Member of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam since 1948.

Nam Cao worked as a clerk and as a teacher. In 1946 he joined the War of Resistance. His prerevolutionary works realistically depicted the tragedy of the “little man” and the spiritual searchings of the intelligentsia living in the oppressive atmosphere of colonial Vietnam. Such works included the novella Chi Pheo (1941), the short-story collections Midnight (1944) and Laughter (1946), and the novel A Worn-out Life (1944, published 1956). After the August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam, Nam Cao, in his collections Border Stories (1950) and Eyes (published 1954), used the genre of fictional documentary to depict the people of the new Vietnam defending the freedom of their homeland. Nam Cao was arrested and shot by the French colonialists.