When he was 13 years old, his grandfather was arrested and imprisoned due to a court case. His father became seriously ill again, and the family fell from prosperity to poverty. When he was sixteen, his father passed away and the family had "almost nothing left." The changes in his family's economic status made Lu Xun taste the harshness of the world and see the corruption of feudal society and the hypocrisy of feudal morality. Lu Xun often lived at his grandmother's house when he was young and after his grandfather was imprisoned, which gave him the opportunity to contact farmers' children and understand the farmers' painful life and hard-working and simple character. All of these had a profound impact on Lu Xun's later thoughts and creations.

In May 1898, Lu Xun entered the Jiangnan Naval School in Nanjing, and later transferred to the Jiangnan Mining and Railway School. During his four years in Nanjing, Lu Xun came into contact with Western bourgeois democratic ideas and modern natural science knowledge from the reformist reforms. Yan Fu's translation of Tianyan Lun made him accept Darwin's theory of evolution and believe in the view of social development that "the future will be better than the past, and the young will be better than the old." Lu Xun graduated from Mining Road School in December 1901, and decided to study in Japan with the belief of "saving the country and the people." In January of the following year, he entered Hongbun College in Tokyo to study. In order to show his determination to fight the Manchu rule to the end and devote himself to the cause of liberation of the motherland, Lu Xun resolutely cut off the braids that symbolized racial oppression, and kept the poem with the inscription, uttering the solemn oath "I recommend Xuanyuan with my blood." In 1904, Lu Xun went to Sendai Medical College to study medicine. He believed that "most of Japan's reform originated from Western medicine" and wanted to take this path to "save the country through science." But the harsh reality made him realize that it was particularly important to change the spirit of the "stupid and weak citizens". So he abandoned medicine to pursue literature, determined to arouse the public through literature and art. In June 1906, Lu Xun returned to Tokyo, actively participated in anti-Qing patriotic revolutionary activities, and translated and introduced foreign novels with a spirit of resistance. In 1907, he wrote articles such as "On the Power of Moro Poetry" and "On Cultural Partiality". From a revolutionary democratic standpoint and using the theory of evolution as the main weapon, he violently criticized all kinds of reactionary trends of thought and proposed ways to reform Chinese society. Political opinions.

In the summer of 1909, he returned to China from Japan and taught in Hangzhou and Shaoxing. When the Revolution of 1911 broke out in 1911, Lu Xun was very excited and enthusiastically welcomed and supported the revolution. In January 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China led by Sun Yat-sen was established in Nanjing. At the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, the Director-General of Education, Lu Xun went to work in the Ministry of Education in Nanjing. Later, he moved to Beijing with the ministry, and served successively as section chief and minister of the Department of Social Education. He saw with his own eyes the farce of Yuan Shikai's proclaimed emperor and Zhang Xun's restoration, as well as the weakness and compromise of the Chinese bourgeoisie. "Every time I looked at it, I became suspicious, so I became very disappointed and depressed." In a lonely and depressed mood, he copied inscriptions and compiled ancient books; at the same time, he investigated China's history and thought about China's future. "Collection of Tang and Song Dynasty Legends" and "Collection of Ji Kang" were mostly compiled during this period.

The victory of the Russian October Revolution gave Lu Xun a strong shock when he was meditating and exploring, and made him see the "dawn of the new century" and the hope of the people's revolution. The outbreak of the "May 4th" patriotic movement invigorated Lu Xun's revolutionary spirit. From 1918 onwards, Lu Xun participated in the editing work of "New Youth". In April of this year, Lu Xun published his first vernacular novel "A Madman's Diary", which exposed the cannibalistic nature of the feudal system and the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, and issued a call to "save the children" and overthrow this society. It has epoch-making significance in the history of modern literature. From then on, Lu Xun was "unstoppable" and published one after another excellent short stories such as "Kong Yiji" and "Medicine" and a large number of dagger-throwing essays. With his thoroughly anti-feudal thoughts and sharp and cold artistic style, he demonstrated the literary revolution. actual performance.

Beginning in the autumn of 1920, Lu Xun taught Chinese classical literature at Peking University, Beijing Women's Normal University and other schools, and persisted in literary creation. "A Brief History of Chinese Novels" is a literary history monograph compiled based on the teaching notes. In December 1921, Lu Xun wrote the famous novel "The True Story of Ah Q". Through the example of farmhand Ah Q, the work denounces the brutal oppression and spiritual enslavement of farmers by the feudal system, and deeply criticizes the incompleteness of the Revolution of 1911. This is one of Lu Xun's masterpieces and a monument in the history of modern literature.

The short story collections "Scream" and "Wandering" were published in 1923 and 1926 respectively, showing a broad picture of life during the Revolution of 1911 and the First Civil Revolutionary War. The collection of prose poems "Wild Grass" is also a work of this period.