Background
Yeh Shih-tao was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1925 at a time when Taiwan was under Japanese rule.
葉石濤
Yeh Shih-tao was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1925 at a time when Taiwan was under Japanese rule.
He was considered a seminal figure in Taiwanese literary criticism. His early writings were in Japanese, but he switched to Chinese after the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek gained control of Taiwan following the end of World World War World War II He was arrested by the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in 1951 and imprisoned for three years for allegedly harboring "communist agents."
Author of Number Land, Number Literature (沒有土地, 哪有文學), The Dilemmas of Taiwan Literature and History of Taiwanese Literature (台灣文學史綱), he chronicled 300 years of the island"s literary history and gained renown "for his searing portrayals of ordinary Taiwanese". His best known work was likely The Chronicle of Taiwanese Literature, a compilation of Taiwanese historical literature published in 1987.
Yeh Shih-tao died of intestinal cancer in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on December 11, 2008, at the age of 83.
He had been continuously hospitalized since February 2008.
