Qian Zhongshu

Qian Zhongshu was a prodigy of classical learning from childhood in Wuxi, studying at Tsinghua University before further study at Oxford and in Paris, where he met and married the writer and translator Yang Jiang. He returned to a China convulsed by war and occupation, teaching at displaced wartime universities that fed directly into his fiction.

Fortress Besieged, his only novel, follows a fraudulently credentialed graduate drifting from failed romance into a miserable marriage, and remains Chinese literature's most quoted satire of ambition and mediocrity: the line comparing marriage to a fortress that people outside want to enter and people inside want to escape became proverbial. He otherwise devoted himself to scholarship, producing the vast comparative-criticism compendium Guanzhui Bian.

Relatively spared the worst of the Cultural Revolution, he grew famously reclusive in later decades, declining nearly all interviews and public honors: reportedly telling an admirer that if you've enjoyed the egg, there's no need to meet the hen that laid it.