This paper was written with the intention of examining the ethics of writing that Kim Yoon-shik showed through his life, focusing on his major works. With more than two hundred works, he built a huge mountain of letters as a literary historian and critic. Three coordinates are used to see the whole of his work. Firstly, the ethical paradox in the complex of modernity and literature, secondly, the psychological conditions that Korean postwar generation had to cope with, and thirdly, the existential uniqueness of a choosing literary writing as a way of life. In this paper I attempts to describe the following four items by accessing Kim's text through these coordinates. I write about two characteristics of Kim's works: researching literary history without writing literary history, and literary criticism without evaluation. In addition, I analyze the meaning of two special points in his works through the symptomatic reading of two unusual points in his two books, Yi Kwang-soo and his Era, and The 20th century literature and thoughts that I have lived. What I ultimately intend to clarify through this analysis is the ethical meaning of Kim Yoon-shik’s very exceptional form of writings.