Abstract: Renowned as a litterature, Pu Songling worked as a private tutor throughout his life. He took such a job both to support himself and to spare time for the Imperial Examinations at the provincial level, but he failed at each trial and ended up as a private tutor at the bottom of the scholar stratum. Beginning his grassroots writing mainly because of the failure in the Imperial Examinations, Pu Songling actually reflected in his works the subsistent states of private tutors in Qing Dynasty who were hopelessly mediocre, unemploymentthreatened and povertystricken. It is in this sense that to study the features of Pu Songling' s grassroots writing may reveal the relationship between the occupations of bottom literary men in traditional Chinese society and their literary travail.

Key words: private tutors life in Qing Dynasty, Pu Songling, grass-roots writing