Wu Cheng'en (15 10? —— 1582? ) Ming Dynasty novelist. The word Ruzhong comes from Sheyang Mountain and Huai 'an (Huai 'an, Jiangsu) Yang Shan. He was born in a poor family where a scholar was reduced to a businessman. Wu Cheng'en was brilliant since he was a child. The Records of Huai 'an Prefecture recorded that he was "Minhui, a learned man, who wrote for poetry." However, his scientific examination was unfavorable, and he didn't make up for the "year-old tribute student" until middle age, and then he lived in Nanjing for a long time and subsidized his family by selling literature. In his later years, due to his poor family, he became a county magistrate in Changxing. Because he didn't like the darkness of officialdom, he quickly resigned angrily and died of poverty.
Since childhood, Wu Cheng'en likes reading wild stories and is familiar with ancient myths and folklore. The frustration of the imperial examination hall and the hardships of life deepened his understanding of the feudal imperial examination system and the dark social reality, which prompted him to express his inner dissatisfaction and resentment in the form of strange novels. He said to himself, "Although my title is intellectual monster, I don't know about ghosts, but I actually remember the variation of human beings, and I have a lesson."
Wu Cheng'en's excellent novel The Journey to the West is based on Xuanzang's experience of going to the Western Heaven in the Tang Dynasty, and on novels, poems and literary works such as The Tale of the Western Regions in the Tang Dynasty and The Biography of the Sanzang Master in the Ji 'en Temple in the Tang Dynasty. It was finally finalized after sorting out and conceiving. Novels, poems and literary works express the author's dissatisfaction with reality and his desire to change reality with the help of mythical figures, and reflect the author's political ideal of establishing a kingly country of "monarch, sage and god". The novel reflects all kinds of situations in the real world with the help of the eighty-one difficulties experienced by Tang Priest and his disciples on the way to learn from the scriptures. This novel is bold in imagination and novel in conception. It adopts the modeling method of trinity of man, god and beast, and creates immortal artistic images such as the Monkey King and Pig Bajie. The book is well organized, complicated but not chaotic, with lively language, dialects and proverbs, and full of life. The theme dilutes the original religious color of the story, greatly enriches the realistic content of novels, poems and literary works, and has the democratic tendency and the characteristics of the times. Novels, poems and literary works are all satirical and humorous. It presents a unique style different from previous stories.
The appearance of The Journey to the West opened up a new category of ghost novels. The clever combination of well-meaning satire and bitter satire with serious criticism in the book directly affects the development of satirical novels. The Journey to the West is the peak of romanticism in ancient novels and a masterpiece of romanticism in the history of world literature. Encyclopedia americana thinks it is "a mythical novel with rich contents and brilliant ideas", while The French Encyclopedia says: "The description of the whole story is full of humor and wit, which gives readers strong interest." Since19th century, it has been translated into more than ten languages, including Japanese, English, French, German and Russian.
Wu Cheng'en's poems were scattered, and later generations compiled four volumes of Sheyang Survival Draft.