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.

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." In 1939, Vũ Trọng Phụng 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.

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