Originally published in Korean as Taeha by Inmunsa, 1939.

Kim Namcheon was born in 1911 in South Pyongan Province, located north of Pyongyang in what is today North Korea--he was, in fact, from the area about which he wrote in Scenes from the Enlightenment. After graduating from high school he went to study in Japan at Hosei University in Tokyo, but he did not complete his studies there. He was active in the proletarian literary movement, and after his return to Korea in 1931 he played a leading role in the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation (KAPF). His early works pursued socialist realism, but he was criticized for focusing too much on the class struggle and not enough on actual human beings living their lives. He sought to rectify this fault, and his efforts resulted in the work for which he is probably best known, Scenes from the Enlightenment. Shortly after liberation from the Japanese he crossed over into North Korea, but it is reported that he was executed in 1953 as part of a cultural purge.