Premchand was one of the greatest literary figures of modern Hindi literature and wrote over 250 short stories, a dozen novels and two plays. Premchand, whose literary career started as a freelancer in Urdu, was the first Hindi author to introduce realism in his writings. He pioneered the new art form of fiction with a social purpose. He wrote of the life around him and made his readers aware of the problems of the urban middle-class and the country's villages. He depicted various realistic issues of the day such as communalism, corruption, debt, poverty, colonialism etc. in his stories.