writing style. Mao Dun entered the three-year foundation school offered by Peking University in 1913, in which he studied Chinese and Western literature. Due to financial difficulties, he had to quit in the summer of 1916, before his graduation. After quitting from university, he immediately got married with the daughter of Kong family (孔家), Kong Dezhi (孔德沚). The trainings in Chinese and English as well as knowledge of Chinese and Western literature provided by the fifteen years of education Mao Dun received had prepared him to show up in the limelight of the Chinese journalistic and literary arena. Journalistic career After graduation, Mao Dun soon got his first job in the English editing and translation sections of the Commercial Press (), Shanghai branch. At the age of 21, he was invited to be the assistant editor of Xuesheng Zazhi () (Students' Magazine) under the Commercial Press, which had published many articles about the new ideologies that had emerged in China at that time. Apart from editing, Mao Dun also started to write about his social thoughts and criticisms. To some extent, he was inspired by the famous magazine New Youth (新青年). Like in 1917 and 1918, he wrote two editorials for Xuesheng Zazhi: Students and Society (學生與社會) and The Students of 1918, those were significant in stimulating political consciousness among the young educated Chinese. At 24 years of age, Mao Dun was already renowned as a novelist by the community in general, and in 1920, he and a group of young writers took over the magazine Xiaoshuo Yuebao (), which translated means "fiction monthly", to publish literature by western authors, such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Byron, Keats, Shaw, etc., and make new theories of literature better known. Despite the fact that he was a naturalistic novelist, he admired writers like Leo Tolstoy, for their great artistic style. In 1920, he was invited to edit a new column: The Fiction-New-Wwaves () in Fiction Monthly (小说月报). He even took up the post of Chief Editor of the Monthly in the same year and was obliged to reform it thoroughly, in response to the New Cultural Movement (). His young writer friends in Beijing supported him by submitting their creative writings, translating Western literature and their views on new literature theories and techniques to the magazines. Literary Study Group () was formed partly because of this. The reformed Monthly was proved