Saki

Who was Saki?

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, and P. G. Wodehouse.

Beside his short stories, he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice, and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion of Britain.

Famous Quotes:

• No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.
• No one has ever said it, but how painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them.
• It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
• Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
• He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
• He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
• Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like -- and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
• The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
• Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.
• Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.