Wu Cheng'en (15 10? —— 1582? ) Ming Dynasty novelist. The word Ruzhong comes from Sheyang Mountain and Huai 'an (Huai 'an, Jiangsu) Yang Shan. He was born in a poor family where a scholar was reduced to a businessman. Wu Cheng'en was brilliant since he was a child. The Records of Huai 'an Prefecture recorded that he was "Minhui, a learned man, who wrote for poetry." However, his scientific examination was unfavorable, and he didn't make up for the "year-old tribute student" until middle age, and then he lived in Nanjing for a long time and subsidized his family by selling literature. In his later years, due to his poor family, he became a county magistrate in Changxing. Because he didn't like the darkness of officialdom, he quickly resigned angrily and died of poverty.

Since childhood, Wu Cheng'en likes reading wild stories and is familiar with ancient myths and folklore. The frustration of the imperial examination hall and the hardships of life deepened his understanding of the feudal imperial examination system and the dark social reality, which prompted him to express his inner dissatisfaction and resentment in the form of strange novels. He said to himself, "although my title is intellectual monster, I don't know ghosts, but I actually remember the variation of human beings, and I have a lesson."

Wu Cheng'en's excellent novel The Journey to the West is based on Xuanzang's experience of learning from the West in the Tang Dynasty. On the basis of the Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty and the Biography of the Sanzang Master by the Tang Dynasty, it was finally written after sorting out and conceiving. With the help of mythical figures, the work expresses the author's dissatisfaction with reality and his desire to change reality, and reflects the political ideal of the author's desire to establish a kingly country of "monarch, saint and god". The novel reflects all kinds of situations in the real world with the help of the eighty-one difficulties experienced by Tang Priest and his disciples on the way to learn from the scriptures. This novel is bold in imagination and novel in conception. It adopts the modeling method of trinity of man, god and beast, and creates immortal artistic images such as the Monkey King and Pig Bajie. The book is well organized, complicated but not chaotic, with lively language, dialects and proverbs, and full of life. The theme dilutes the original religious color of the story, greatly enriches the realistic content of the work, and has democratic tendency and characteristics of the times. This work is both ironic and humorous. It presents a unique style different from previous stories.

The appearance of The Journey to the West opened up a new category of ghost novels. The clever combination of well-meaning satire and bitter satire with serious criticism in the book directly affects the development of satirical novels. The Journey to the West is the peak of romanticism in ancient novels and a masterpiece of romanticism in the history of world literature. Encyclopedia americana thinks it is "a mythical novel with rich contents and brilliant ideas", while The French Encyclopedia says: "The description of the whole story is full of humor and wit, which gives readers strong interest." Since19th century, it has been translated into more than ten languages, including Japanese, English, French, German and Russian.

Wu Cheng'en's poems were scattered, and later generations compiled four volumes of Sheyang Survival Draft.