Class VIII Unit-2 On Telling a Tale-The Story Teller

Hector Hugh Munro
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 satirised Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story.
Born in Akyab, Burma (now Myanmar) on December 18, 1870, Hector Hugh Munro was the son of Charles Augustus Munro and Mary Frances Mercer. Charles Munro was an Inspector-General for the Burmese Police. Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth, Devon and at Bedford School. After the death of his wife Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, to England, where they were brought up by their grandmother and aunts in a strict puritanical household.
In 1893, Hector followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police, where he was posted to Burma. Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.
At the start of World War I,  Munro  joined 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper, later transferring to 22nd Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, where he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. On November 13, 1916, when sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre he was killed by a German sniper. 
He started his career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, Bystander, Morning Post, and Outlook. In 1900, Munro's first book appeared: The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 1902 to 1908, Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday), and Paris; he then gave that up and settled in London. 
Beside his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), 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 (a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion of Britain.