China’s most serious contender for the Nobel Prize for literature until the mid-1980s, the Hunanese Shen Ts’ung-wen (1902–1988), would have probably received the honor if political pressures had not forced him to abandon fiction writing and turn to museum curating around mid-century. Although he had been a close personal friend of leftist literati like Ting Ling and her communist husband, Hu Yeh-p’in, as early as the 1920s, his unwillingness to focus on society’s down-and-out or portray provincial China as hellishly exploitative infuriated many leftist cultural figures. Lu Hsün blackballed Shen Ts’ung-wen’s work from appearing in some key 1930s literary anthologies, and Shen became a persona non grata on China’s literary scene during the three decades before the cultural thaw in the wake of Mao’s death. Afterward, Shen Ts’ung-wen’s massive oeuvre reemerged as probably the most distinguished single body of short and medium-length fiction in twentieth-century China.