Influencers and influenced

Hector Hugo Munro (1870-1916) – pen-name Saki; aka H. H. Munro – was one of the greatest and most prolific short-story writers of the early 20th century. A satirist who lampooned the orthodoxy and establishment norms of his day, he used humour to deflate the pretensions and stiffness of the late Victorian era and the Edwardian age. While Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, and English writers, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling were his sources of inspiration, in turn he influenced witty, flamboyant English playwright, Noël Coward, (Blithe Spirit and Private Lives), humorist author, P. G. Wodehouse (of Wooster and Jeeves fame) and hugely successful children’s writer, A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh). Like Kipling, Saki was also born in British India (though in British Burma, not Bombay). Like Wilde he was homosexual at a time when sexual activity between men was a crime in Britain. And like Carroll he wrote under a nom de plume (Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Meanwhile, thanks to his upbringing, in common with Coward, Wodehouse, Carroll, Milne and Kipling, Munro was quintessentially English in both appearance and outlook. His highly rated collections of short stories include the following: Dogged, 1899; Reginald, 1904; Reginald in Russia, 1910; The Chronicles of Clovis, 1911 and Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914. Posthumous collections include:  The Toys of Peace, 1919; Square Egg and Other Sketches, 1924; The Complete Short Stories of Saki, 1930; Short Stories, 1976, and Improper Stories, 2010. He died on the 4th November 1916 (aged 45) at Beaumont-Hamel, France during World War I’s bitter Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in human history, when he was shot by a German sniper.