Yü Ta-Fu

Born 1896 in Fuyang, Chekiang Province; died Sept. 17, 1945. Chinese writer.

Yü graduated from Tokyo University with an economics degree. He took part in the May Fourth Movement, and in 1921 he helped found the Creation Society. In the same year he wrote the sentimental-romantic novella The Whirlpool. Yü’s short stories and socially oriented lyric “free prose” written in the 1920’s reflected an intensification of the personal element in Chinese prose. Notable collections from this period include Cooled Ashes, The Chicken’s Rib, and The Past. His heroes are most often members of the intelligentsia who fail to find a use in semifeudal China for the knowledge they have acquired abroad.

Yü’s works also include travel sketches, critical articles, translations, and the novellas The Late Flowers of the Cinnamon Tree, Autobiography, and Flight. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 he published in Singapore, where he emigrated in 1938, patriotic articles in support of the Wuhan government. A participant in the anti-Japanese movement that existed among Chinese émigrés in Singapore, Yü was seized by the police and secretly executed.