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Wu is now best known for being the author of Journey to the West. Wu is thought to have published the work in anonymity due to the social pressures at the time. At the time when Wu lived, there was a trend in Chinese literary circles to imitate the classical literature of the Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties, written in Classical Chinese;[1] late in life, however, Wu went against this trend by writing the novel, Journey to the West in the vernacular tongue. Because of the ill repute of "vulgar" literature at the time, it is believed Wu published the novel anonymously. For over three centuries most of China remained unaware of its authorship, although the people of his hometown attributed the novel to him early on.[3]
Still, the novel's authorship is debated. The novel was published anonymously in 1592, and Wu did not refer to the work in any other of his writings.[3] However, in the early twentieth century, Hu Shih and his students conducted textual analysis and research into Qing Dynasty records and suggested that Wu was the author.[1] In his Introduction to Arthur Waley's abridgment, Monkey, Dr. Hu, then ambassador to the United States, reported that a 1625 gazetteer, a form of local history, from Wu's hometown claimed Wu as the author.[3] Brown University China literature scholar David Lattimore summarized more recent thinking: "The Ambassador's confidence was quite unjustified. What the gazetteer says is that Wu wrote something called The Journey to the West. It mentions nothing about a novel. The work in question could have been any version of our story, or something else entirely."[5] Translator W.F.J. Jenner points out that although Wu had knowledge of Chinese bureaucracy and politics, the novel itself doesn't include any political details that "a fairly well-read commoner could not have known."[4] Furthermore, it is unknown how much of the novel was created, and how much was simply compiled and edited, since much of the legend behind Journey to the West already existed in folk tales.[4] Anthony Yu, in his introduction to his translation of the entire novel, states that the identity of the author, as with so many other major works of Chinese fiction, "remains unclear" but that Wu remains "the most likely" author.
