Saki (H. H. Munro)
(1870–1916)

The creation of individualistic style and the adoption of form to fit one's material are major challenges for every writer. Few can be said to have met these challenges as skillfully and elegantly as the satirist Saki (H. H. Munro).

Born in Burma, Hector Hugh Munro was raised by two aunts in the English county of Devon. He seems to have spent his childhood under a strict, authoritarian regime, if one is to judge by the satirical portraits of aunts in many of his short stories. As a young adult, Munro returned to Burma to serve in that colony's military police force. After of couple of years, however, recurrent bouts of ill health forced his return to England where he remained for good. Determined to earn a living as a writer, he settled in London.

The turn of the century found Munro writing a regular column for the Westminster Gazette. After a year of writing political satire, he became a foreign news correspondent for the Morning Post, taking posts in Poland, Russia, and France. It was not until 1904 that Munro capitalized on his true calling when he published a collection of short stories titled Reginald–writing under the pen name Saki (possible borrowed from the name of the cupbearer in Edward Fitzgerald's popular poem "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"). The stories of Reginald, seldom over a few pages in length, were comically satirical glimpses of upper class British society during the Edwardian period. With remarkable economy of language, Saki was able to re-create precisely the manners and costumes, not to mention the snobbery and boorishness that typified the group.

The success of Reginald secured Saki's reputation as master of the comedy of manners, and in his later collection, Reginald in Russia (1910) and The Chronicles of Clovis (1911, he revived some of the zany characters from his original cast. The tone of many of these stories, which might be described as a playful yet bitingly ironic, was similar to that used by Alexander Pope in "The Rape of the Lock." Saki's refraining from serious treatments of his subject matter was probably rooted at least partly in the fact that he was a member of the very social class that he mocked.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Saki enlisted for duty in the British army. Two years later he was killed in action in France. Among the collection of his stories published after his death are The Toys of Peace (1919) and The Square Egg (1924). Although some readers regard his stories as an acquired taste, Saki remains one of the 20th-century's foremost "cupbearers" in the long tradition of England social satire.

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