Saki, pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro Biography

British writer, born in Burma, educated in England; after his mother's death when he was an infant he was brought up in North Devon by two aunts. He served in the Burmese military police, and from 1900 wrote political satire for the Westminster Gazette. During 1902–8 he was correspondent for the Morning Post in Poland, Russia, and Paris. He is best remembered for the mercilessly alienated stories published in Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), The Toys of Peace (1919), and The Square Egg (1924). Satirical and occasionally macabre, his tales frequently used wolves, tigers, cats, and bulls to enact revenge on mankind; his works influenced writers as diverse as R. Firbank, N. Coward, and J. Collier. The Unbearable Bassington (1912) displays the author's characteristic irony. When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1913) is one of his finest admonitory novels on political themes published during the troubled decades before the Great War; it presents the moral conundrums attendant upon England's imagined defeat, and stands as his most sustained analysis of a dying world. In 1914 he enlisted as a trooper and was killed in France while resting in a shallow crater.