The purposes of this study were to investigate the genre character of Fruitful Youth, a newly discovered prose collection of Lee Yong-ak, and examine the meanings of youth representation in two of its works, A 20-Year-Old Chemical Engineer and The Virgin of a Much Proud Land. The findings were as follows:First, it is not easy to discriminate the genre characters of A 20-Year-Old Chemical Engineer and The Virgin of a Much Proud Land since they contain the character of both ocherk and novel. Indeed, it seems that the genre characters of ocherks written in the 1950s were very mixed, and what were defined as the features of ocherks by Lee Hyo-woon also corresponded largely to those of novels except for the comment feature, which means that it is practically difficult to distinguish ocherks from novels. The present study assumed that A 20-Year-Old Chemical Engineer and The Virgin of a Much Proud Land made a genre in the transitional stage from portrait(character) ocherks to novels on the grounds of their comment feature and the publica tion date, circulation, and genre fluidity and hybridity of Fruitful Youth. The study decided to place the two works in the changing process from ocherks to novels rather than subjecting them to either of the genres on the grounds that the genre distinction of ocherks was confusing, that portrait ocherks evolved into factions later, and that the two works were different in length and structure and defined A 20-Year-Old Chemical Engineer closer to a portrait ocherk and The Virgin of a Much Proud Land closer to a novel in terms of genre character. Secondly, Lee Yong-ak embodied a youth hero in his works published in 1955 after returning to the literary circles of North Korea since the ban on writing in 1953. The positive youth heroes in A 20-Year-Old Chemical Engineer and The Virgin of a Much Proud Land were the embodiment of heroes required in North Korean literature during the “period of postwar rehabilitation and establishment of socialism.” Both the works had a character of growth tale and tried to lead the future of establishment of socialism through the process of the boy Kang Won-gap and the girl Jeon Chang-ok growing into youth heroes, respectively,