Younghill Kang

Younghill Kang (Kang Yong-hŭl, 강용흘, 姜鏞訖) was a Korean American poet, scholar, and novelist born in Hamgyong Province, Korea, near the end of the Joseon Dynasty. The official year of his birth is 1903, but most scholars concede that he was actually born in 1898. Born into a yangban, or aristocratic family, Kang immigrated to the United States in 1921 right before the passage of the Immigrant Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act).

Kang first attended Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1921 before receiving a bachelor of science degree at Boston University in 1925. Kang pursued a master’s degree in English education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education from 1925–27.

After graduating from Harvard, Kang moved to New York, where he became an assistant professor of comparative literature at New York University in 1929 and taught courses such as “Literature of the Far East,” “Oriental Influences on English Literature,” and “Comparative Literature.” During this time, he met the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who introduced Kang’s manuscript for The Grass Roof to editor Maxwell Perkins. 

Kang and his wife, fellow poet Frances Stacy Keely, who, in marrying Kang, forfeited her American citizenship due to violating anti-miscegenation laws, established themselves within New York City’s intellectual elite in the 1930s. The couple lived in a building owned by St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Additionally Kang worked as a curator of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Kang’s first autobiographical novel, The Grass Roof (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), follows the young artist Chungpa Han in rural Korea as he makes his way to Seoul then Tokyo to get an education during Japanese colonization. Kang, widely referred to as the “father of Asian American literature” was not the first published Korean American writer, but he was the first Korean American writer to achieve success through The Grass Roof.

Scholar Kyhan Lee describes the importance of the book in the Winter 1991 issue of Korea Journal:

A few Asian-American scholars like Elaine Kim have offered a more practical explanation that the preponderance of Asian-American autobiographical material during the early years was more indicative of the taste of the publishers than that of the Asian-American authors themselves, many of whom would have been more comfortable with familiar genres of poetry and fiction. For instance, Younghill Kang’s autobiographical novel “The Grass Roof” betrays the author’s profound attachment to the medium of poetry. It can also be conjectured that even from the standpoint of the Korean-American writers themselves, the Western autobiographical form would have been deemed potentially useful in authenticating generalizations concerning culture and customs unfamiliar to their particular audience. In sum, albeit in a westernized autobiographical form, to the Korean-American author, the notion of the “I” still conformed with its traditional connotation of the “collective whole.” Recollections of the sorrows and joys of boyhood experiences in Korea or private reflections of immigrant life in the U.S. were meant to have broader implications as the collective experience and thoughts of the Korean-Americans as a whole.

From 1933 to 1935, Kang left New York City to travel through Rome, Berlin, Munich, and Paris while working on the sequel to The Grass Roof, titled East Goes West (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937) that would follow Chungpa Han’s experience of furthering his education in the U.S. In the late 1940s, Kang returned to Korea as chief of publications in the Military Government’s Office of Publications, and, later, as an adviser to the director of the XXIV Corps Office of Civil Information.

Kang died on December 11, 1972, at his home in Satellite Beach, Florida.