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Kim Il-sung (15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was the leader of North Korea for 46 years, from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994.
According to North Korean sources, the works of Kim Il-sung amount to approximately 10,800 speeches, reports, books, treatises and other types of works. North Korean sources say that publishing houses in 110 countries have published works of Kim Il-sung in translations in some 60 languages.
Kim Il-sung's works are published and republished in countless collections. These include the 100-volume Complete Works of Kim Il-sung (chŏnjip), the 50-volume Collected Works (chŏjakchip) and the 15-volume Selected Works (sŏnjip). In North Korea, his works are published by the Workers' Party of Korea Publishing House.
The English editions, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, as Kim Il-sung Works, Kim Il-sung Selected Works, and Kim Il-sung Complete Works have reached volume 50, eight, and four, respectively. Volumes 12 and 25 of Kim Il-sung Works and volume seven of Selected Works were never published in English.
Different editions have played a significant role in the propagation of the Juche idea. In 1960, the second edition of a collection of Kim Il-sung's speeches was published. It included Kim's speech On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work, which was not considered an important work at the time. After the publication, American scholars translated the speech into English and left the word "Juche" untranslated. According to B.R. Myers, this marked the begin of the recognition of Juche as a distinct ideology.
According to B.R. Myers, Kim Il-sung's cult of personality was consciously trying to match that of Mao Zedong. Thus when Mao was renowned for his poetry, the North Koreans matched this with claiming that Kim Il-sung had written plays during the anti-Japanese struggle of the 1930s. Two plays that were allegedly written by Kim Il-sung are The Sea of Blood and The Flower Girl. Nonetheless, Kim Il-sung also wrote at least one poem, called "Brightest Star", written in 1992 to congratulate Kim Jong-il on behalf of the latter's birthday. Kim Il-sung also wrote song lyrics.
With the Century, Kim Il-sung's eight-volume autobiography written shortly before his death, is his most popular work among North Korean readership.