American Oriental Society. He was also a member of the Association for Asian Studies as well as a member of the American Philosophical Society. The most influential of Creel’s books include The Birth of China (1936), the first detailed account of the significance of the archaeological excavations at Anyang, which quickly attracted global interest; Studies in Early Chinese Culture (1937) which was an influential collection of monographic essays; Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method, vols. I–III (1938–52), a groundbreaking and controversial attempt to teach literary Chinese through carefully glossed excerpts of standard classical texts; Newspaper Chinese by the Inductive Method (1943), an effort to apply identical pedagogical techniques to the analysis of Chinese newspapers; Confucius, the Man and the Myth (1949), a critical analysis of the philosopher Confucius; Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (1953), a survey of Chinese thought; The Origins of Statecraft in China, Vol. 1: The Western Chou Empire (University of Chicago Press, 1970), a judicial account of the polity of the Western Zhou dynasty; What is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 1970) and Shen Pu-hai: A Chinese Political Philosophy of the Fourth Century B.C. (1974), a monograph on Shen Buhai, an early Chinese specialist on administrative technique. Style and legacy He is especially known for Confucius: The Man and the Myth (1949), which argued that Confucius had been misunderstood because legend had obscured the facts of his life and his ideas. Creel held that Confucius was a reformer and an individualist, as well as a democratic and revolutionary teacher. From the start of his career in the 1930s, Creel was an outspoken proponent of the theory that Chinese characters are inherently ideographic in nature. Creel was opposed by sinologists Peter A. Boodberg and Paul Pelliot, who believed that phonetic principles played a large role in the early history of Chinese characters. The debate has continued many decades later without either side being able to discredit the other. Creel died at his home in Palos Park, Illinois, after a long illness, on June 1, 1994, at the age of 89. Selected works Creel, H. G. (1936). The Birth of China. London: Jonathan Cape. Rpt. New York: John Day, 1937; New York: Frederick Ungar: 1954. ——— (1938–52). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— (1949). Confucius, the Man and the Myth. New York: