Chapter 33 About Van Loon and His Writings

Hendrik Van Loon, a stout Dutch-American who weighed two hundred pounds, was good at writing popular historical works with extremely light and witty words, and was loved by countless young readers. Since the 1920s, he has published a series of such works, most of which have become bestsellers in the United States and have been translated into many languages.Famous works such as "The Story of Mankind", "The Geography of Van Loon", "The Story of Invention", and "The Story of the Bible" have already been translated into Chinese and have had a profound impact on a whole generation of young people in our country.

The historian Cao Juren recalled in "My World and Me" that in the 1920s he accidentally bought a Chinese translation of "The Story of Human Beings" while waiting for the bus, so—— "That afternoon, I read this history like a madman. When the car came, I read it in the car. When I got home, I swallowed my dinner and read it on the bed. I read it until dawn, and finally finished it. In the past 50 years, I have always read and read. Except for, no other book has attracted me so much. I also determined to write a "Oriental Human Story". Time is pressing, and it seems that I can't write it; But Fang Long's influence on me is really more profound than that of Wang Chuanshan and Zhang Shizhai!"

In the preface of Lin Weiyin's translation of "Ancient People", Yu Dafu analyzed Fang Loon's writing art, and believed that his method—— "It's really ingenious. The dry and tasteless scientific common sense, after he writes it in such a way, no matter adults or children, people who read his books feel tired of talking." "Fang Loon's pen has this kind of magical power, but it is not his special creation. It is just a writer's technique used to describe science." Fang Loon was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1882. Although his family was very rich, his father did not care about the children and separated from each other, so he "escaped from the past" since he was a child. Later, "it is better to understand the seventeenth century than to understand the twentieth century".He was deeply influenced by the Dutch humanist Erasmus. He always opposed ignorance and bigotry, and had deep sympathy for the working people.Fang Loon studied in the United States and Germany after 1903 and obtained a doctorate, but this did not make him flourish, nor did he earn a living in his study.He even argues:

"As soon as learning puts on the slippers of an expert, hides in its 'abode', and shakes the manure of the soil from its shoes, it announces that it is ready to die. The life of knowledge in isolation lead to destruction." Before and after college, Fang Loon wandered many times. He worked as a teacher, editor, and reporter.He began to write books in 1913, and in 1921 he wrote "The Story of Mankind", which became famous in one fell swoop, and has been famous all over the world since then, until his death in 1946. Fang Loon is versatile, he can speak and write ten kinds of languages, he can play the violin with one hand, and he can also draw pictures. The illustrations of his works are all written by himself.

The present volume, originally published in 1925, was reprinted in 1940.Here Fang Loon recounts the history of the development of human thought, advocates the freedom of thought, advocates tolerance to dissent, and condemns reactionary elements for suppressing new ideas.When he was preparing to publish the second edition of this book in 1940, it was the day when fascist forces were rampant all over the world, which was a serious blow to his ideal of "tolerance".But Van Loon did not give up his ideals, and called on people with integrity and a sense of justice to "recharge their batteries and preserve themselves so that we can usher in the day when reconstruction work begins."Fang Loon held a humanist position all his life, and he inevitably had different views from Marxism on some issues, which we can understand.

Van Loon's works have not been published after the liberation of our country.In order to learn from and inherit the spiritual heritage of predecessors and develop the writing of popular social science books in our country, I specially selected and translated several works of Van Loon, and published them successively for reference.Readers are welcome to suggest improvements to the publication of the Chinese translation of Van Loon's works.