This first and only study of North Korean literary history by a Western scholar deals with the crucial role played by Han Sorya, chairman of the D.P.R.K.'s Federation of Literature and Art from 1948 to his purge in 1962, both in devising the iconography of Kim Il Sung's personality cult and in defining the early course of North Korean letters. Through brief studies of Han's own canonical works the author also sets out to dispel the widely-held assumption that North Korean literature is compatible with Soviet and Chinese socialist realism. The appendix includes a complete translation of Han's 1951 novella Jackals (Sungnyangi).