Vũ Trọng Phụng

Vũ Trọng Phụng

Vũ Trọng Phụng (Hanoi, 20 October 1912 – Hanoi, 13 October 1939) was a popular Vietnamese author and journalist, who is considered to be one of the most influential figures of 20th century Vietnamese literature. Today, several of his works are taught in Vietnamese schools.

Vũ Trọng Phụng's ancestral village was Hảo village, Mỹ Hào District, Hưng Yên Province, yet he was born, grew up, and died in Hanoi. The fact that his father died of tuberculosis when he was only 7 months old resulted in Vũ Trụng Phụng's being brought up mainly by his mother. After finishing primary school, sixteen-year-old Vũ Trọng Phụng was forced to stop schooling and earn his own living. In 1939, he died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six (twenty-seven by the Vietnamese system of counting age), a week before his twenty-seventh birthday.

Vũ Trọng Phụng wrote prolifically during the 1930s, and "produced a body of writing that", according to Zinoman, "stands today as the single most remarkable individual achievement in modern Vietnamese literature." Although he only wrote for a short span of time, with his first work being the short story "Chống nạng lên đường" ("Set off with crutches") on the newspaper "Ngọ báo" in 1930, he had left an amazing collection of literature works: over 30 short stories, 9 novels, 9 reports, 7 plays, along with a translated play from French, some literature reviews and criticising, and hundreds of articles on the matters of politics, society, and culture. Some excerpts from his publications, for example "Số đỏ" (Dumb Luck) and "Giông Tố" (The Storm), were taken into Vietnamese literature textbooks.

Famous with the satire in his works, he was compared to Balzac by some critics. However, due to his "realistic" descriptions and heavy emphasis on sex, he was called to court by the French authority in Ha Noi for "outraging morality" (outrage aux bonnes moeurs). Later on, his works were prohibited to be published or read in North Vietnam because they were "obscene publications" until the late 1980s.

The peasant novel Giông Tố (The Storm) 1936

Translations

• Vũ Trọng Phụng Dumb Luck 1936 (translation: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
• Vũ Trọng Phụng Lục Xì: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi (translation: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011)
• Vũ Trọng Phụng The Industry of Marrying Europeans (translation: Cornell South East Asian Program)