As an author, Myrdal was self-taught. Having dropped out of gymnasium to concentrate on his writing, he was briefly employed as a journalist at a local newspaper and struggled to find a publisher for early novel drafts. "Report from a Chinese Village" (1963) was not his first published book, but it became his breakthrough, including, to a lesser extent, on the international level. A semi-anthropological study, it offered a snapshot of life in a village in Mao's China, which was then largely isolated and little understood even in left-wing circles. He would later publish similar reports and travel notes from Asian countries, including India, Afghanistan, and the then-Soviet Central Asia.