Hector Hugh Munro Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life
Hector Hugh Munro, known to readers by the pen name Saki, was born on 18 December 1870 in Akyab, British Burma (now Sittwe, Myanmar), into a family embedded in the British imperial service. His father, Charles Augustus Munro, served in the colonial police in Burma, and his mother, Mary Frances Munro (nee Mercer), died in 1872 after a freak accident in England when she was knocked down by a runaway cow. The early loss of his mother and the frequent absence of his father, who was bound to his post in Asia, placed the children primarily under the care of stern maiden aunts in Devon. These aunts, remembered for their strictness and propriety, presided over a household that combined respectability with a certain emotional chill. Munro grew up alongside his sister Ethel and his brother Charles, and their family dynamic, with its aunts and cousins, would later furnish him with a gallery of memorable types for his fiction, where officious guardians and precocious youngsters frequently clash.

Education and Colonial Service
Munro was educated in England, attending Pencarwick School in Exmouth and later Bedford School. The schooling exposed him to classics and to the rhythms of English social life that would become his lifelong subject. In 1893 he followed his father's path to empire by joining the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. The experience provided him with firsthand impressions of colonial bureaucracy, tropical life, and the precarious balance between authority and vulnerability at the edges of empire. However, recurrent bouts of ill health, especially malaria, forced him to resign and return to England within a few years. The failure of his colonial career was a turning point. Back in London he found a different field for his gifts: journalism, political observation, and eventually the short story.

Journalism and the Making of "Saki"
Munro began contributing to newspapers and magazines at the end of the 1890s. He showed an early taste for history and political satire with The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900), a cool, Gibbon-esque survey that announced his capacity for compressed judgment and epigrammatic phrasing. His emergence as a humorist came through sketches and political squibs in the Westminster Gazette, where he learned to apply a light touch to serious subjects. The Westminster Alice (1902), illustrated by F. Carruthers Gould, parodied Lewis Carroll to lampoon the political life of the day, catching the mannerisms of public figures and policies associated with figures such as Arthur Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain. Around this time he also published Not-So Stories (1902), turning the fables of empire inside out.

In the first decade of the new century he became a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post, reporting from the Balkans, Russia, and later Paris. These assignments sharpened his eye for power, intrigue, and social mask-wearing. Observing the tensions that would later erupt into war, he wrote dispatches that balanced irony with accurate detail. The discipline of journalism gave him a prose style at once brisk and suggestive, and the cosmopolitan vantage point helped him refine the detached yet mischievous tone that readers came to associate with Saki.

Short Fiction, Novels, and Themes
Saki's fiction began gathering in book form with Reginald (1904), a series of monologues by a languid, waspish young man who skewers the self-importance of Edwardian society. Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910) expanded the range. He then moved to a new alter ego, the insouciant Clovis Sangrail, whose appearances in The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) established the core of Saki's voice: clipped, polished dialogue; epigrams that bite; and plots that end in comic cruelty. Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) followed, consolidating his mastery of the short form.

His stories are celebrated for elegant malice and a strain of the macabre. The Open Window delivers a perfect bait-and-switch through a guileful niece; Tobermory imagines a cat who learns to speak and promptly destroys the social balance by revealing secrets; Sredni Vashtar studies a boy who enthrones a ferret as his private deity and dreams of vengeance against a tyrannical guardian; The Lumber-Room catches a child outwitting pious adults; Gabriel-Ernest hints at the supernatural beneath bucolic surfaces; and Esme turns a safari mishap into a parable of vanity. Saki's animals are never mere ornaments; they are embodiments of wildness and retribution against stuffy convention. His children and adolescents, meanwhile, often possess a clear-eyed sense of justice that eludes their elders.

Although primarily a short story writer, Munro produced two novels of note. The Unbearable Bassington (1912) anatomizes a gifted but self-sabotaging young man and the emotional costs of social comedy, revealing a darker undertow beneath the glitter. When William Came (1913), a work of invasion literature, imagines a German occupation of London and tests English complacency, patriotism, and the fragility of liberal illusions on the eve of war. In all of this work, the pen name Saki, commonly supposed to have been drawn from the cupbearer in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, signaled a persona: urbane, quick-witted, and merciless toward hypocrisy.

Circles, Family, and Private Life
In London Munro moved among journalists, editors, and society figures who supplied both companionship and copy. His closest sustained relationship appears to have been with his sister, Ethel Munro, who kept house with him at various times and became the careful custodian of his papers after his death. Ethel's devotion shaped the posthumous fate of his reputation: she worked with publishers to bring out collections that preserved the breadth of his journalism and fiction, ensuring that the voice known as Saki remained in print.

The imprint of family life remained visible in his art. The strict aunts who had overseen his childhood, and whom his siblings Ethel and Charles also endured, recur as figures of comic terror in stories where authority is both ridiculous and dangerous. Munro never married, and, living in an era of legal and social hostility to homosexuality, he protected his privacy. The need to pass lightly and to hide in plain sight dovetailed with a writing style that prizes surface poise and the relish of masks. Friends and colleagues valued his wit and conversational sparkle, but those qualities also functioned as defense and disguise in a world that demanded conformity.

War Service and Death
At the outbreak of the First World War Munro, then in his forties and already an established author, enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers. He is known to have refused an offered commission, wanting to serve directly at the front. The decision surprised some acquaintances who associated him with drawing rooms rather than trenches, but it was in character: behind the polish, Saki possessed a stiff moral core, skeptical of cant but serious about duty.

He served on the Western Front in France and experienced the mud, danger, and attrition that reshaped European consciousness. On 14 November 1916, during the Battle of the Ancre near Beaumont-Hamel, he was killed by a sniper while in the trenches. According to widely repeated accounts, his last words to a comrade were, "Put that damned cigarette out!", a final injunction of practical good sense met by sudden violence. He was forty-five. With no known grave, he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, among thousands whose fates mark the scale of the war's loss.

Reception and Legacy
Saki's contemporaries recognized him as a master of the short story, and the generations that followed have confirmed the judgment. Editors and readers long kept his tales in circulation because they achieve, in a few pages, the satisfaction of a fable, the chill of a ghost story, and the sparkle of high comedy. His stylized dialogue and effortless aphorisms locate him in the same tradition of English wit associated with Oscar Wilde, yet his sensibility is colder and more predatory, closer to a fabulist who sees the universe as a game with jagged rules. The stories make brilliant entertainment out of social codes precisely because their author was an outsider within, intimately acquainted with clubland and drawing room rituals yet poised to expose their self-deceptions.

After his death, Ethel Munro played the pivotal role in sustaining his presence in print, seeing through the publication of The Toys of Peace and Other Papers (1919) and later collections such as The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924). These volumes preserved not only the famous stories but also journalism and fragments that reveal his range. The continuing appeal of pieces like The Open Window and Sredni Vashtar in anthologies and classrooms attests to the durability of his ironies. Children in his fiction often win small victories against repressive elders, and readers savor the same triumph vicariously over solemnity, cant, and the petty rituals of status.

If his life traced a path from colonial outpost to metropolitan satire and finally to the mud of the Somme, the arc also sketches a portrait of an artist who refused both self-pity and self-importance. The people who mattered most to him, his father Charles Augustus Munro, who embodied discipline and service; his mother Mary Frances, whose absence haunted his early years; his siblings Charles and Ethel, companions in a house ruled by aunts; the editors and colleagues who gave him platforms; and the comrades with whom he shared danger, stand just behind the curtain of his pages. Their outlines can be seen in the play of affection and asperity that defines his work. In that sense, Hector Hugh Munro wrote his world twice: first as the boy and man who lived it, and then as Saki, the artist who distilled its comedy and its cruelty into unforgettable forms.

Our collection contains 13 quotes who is written by Hector, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Truth - Sarcastic - Fake Friends.

• 1914 Beasts and Super-Beasts (Collection)
• 1913 When William Came (Novel)
• 1912 The Unbearable Bassington (Novel)
• 1911 The Chronicles of Clovis (Collection)
• 1909 The Toys of Peace (Play)
• 1904 Reginald (Collection)