Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Hector Hugh Munro” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Hector Hugh Munro

(1870 – 1916)

Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab, Burma ‘(now Myanmar), the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general in the Burma police. Munro’s mother, the former Mary Frances Mercer, died in 1872. Munro was brought up in England with his brother and sister by aunts who frequently used the birch and whip. He was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School. From 1887 he travelled with his family in France, Germany and Switzerland. In 1891 his father settled in Devon, where he worked as a teacher. In 1893 Munro joined the Burma police. Three years later he was back in England and started his career as a journalist, writing for the Westminster Gazette.

In 1900 Munro’s first book, The Rise Of The Russian Empire, appeared. It is a historical study modelled upon Gibbon’s famous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was followed in 1902 with a collection of short stories, Not-So-Stories. From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris, and then returned to London. In 1914 his novel When William Came appeared, in which he portrayed what might happen if the German emperor conquered England. Saki’s best fables are often more macabre than Kipling’s. Among Saki’s most frequently anthologized short stories is Tobermory, in which a cat, who has seen too much scandal through country house windows, learns to talk and starts to re-peat the guests’ vicious comments about each other. The Open Window was a tale-within-a-tale. In the short story Sredni Vashtar from The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) a young boy makes an idol of his illicit pet ferret.

Saki was a misogynist, anti-Semite, and reactionary, who also did not take himself too serious. His stories, “true enough to be interesting and not true enough to be tiresome”, were considered ideal reading for schoolboys. However, Saki did not have any interest in safeguarding the Edwardian way of life. “Saki writes like an enemy” said V.S. Pritchett later. “Society has bored him to the Point of murder. Out laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.” In ‘Laura‘ the title character is first reincarnated as a destructive otter after her death, and then as a naked brown Nubian boy. Reginald and Clovis, two of his most famous heroes, appeared in a series of stories in which the two soul mates of Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz shock the conventional world or leave the reader to read between the lines.