C y LeeChin Yang Lee or C. Y. Lee was a Chinese American author best known for his 1957 novel The Flower Drum Song, which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song and the eponymous 1961 film which was nominated for five Academy Awards. e wrote many other books. His regular job was writing for the Chinese Language newspapers in New York. Chin Yang Lee (Li Jinyang) was born in December 27, 1915 into a scholarly family in Hunan, China. He also lived in Burma, India and Indo China. In 1940 he received his BA degree from National Southwest Associated University in Yunnan, China. He came to the United States in 1943. He attended Yale and Columbia Universities and in 1947 he received his MA from the Department of Drama at Yale University. He served as City Editor of Chinese World, a San Francisco paper, and Young China, a Chinese Language daily newspaper in San Francisco. He was a feature language program writer for Radio Free Asia. He died of kidney failure in Los Angeles, California on November 8, 2018 at the age of 102. Read More Read Less