Shen Congwen
Huang has said that in his early years he had limited access to literature in Chinese and that significant influences were Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Killers"; Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," "The Bear," "The Wild Palms", and other American literature. Two other important influences were an anthology of short stories by Shen Congwen and a Chinese translation of stories by Anton Chekhov.