This intimate examination of the career, times, and ideas of P'u Sung-ling focuses on his magnum opus, Liao-chai chih-i, or Tales of the World of the Unusual from the Studio for Deliberation and Musing. P'u lived through the turbulent period of Ming-Ch'ing dynastic transition in the seventeenth century.

While P'u did not attain his goal of becoming a statesman, failing exam after exam for fifty years, he was not impeded in his intellectual and literary pursuits. When he died in 1715, he left a body of work including over 500 essays, 1,295 poems, 119 lyrics, 15 encyclopedias and handbooks, 20 operas, 100 folk songs, and 500 short stories. He came to be one of the most well-known scholar-writers and the best-known short-story author in Chinese history.

The 500 stories in Liao-chai chih-i, which P'u composed in his self-styled capacity as a historian, had the most lasting influence of any single work on the shaping of popular consciousness in China. Following the life and literature of one man, this study sets out to detail the history of the Ming-Ch'ing dynastic transition in the East Shantung region.