by Saki

H. Munro (born in 1879 in Burma) H took the pen name "Saki" (after the o cup-bearer in the immensely popular Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) when his first work was published in the Westminster Gazette, a London literary journal. He had a tendency to display dark humor in most of his writing, as reflected in "The Open Window" and in most of his other short stories. Saki's morbid storytelling was due in large part to his secluded upbringing by his grandmother and two unmarried aunts in the countryside of west England in the 1870s and 1880s as well as to his conservative social and political philosophies, increasingly under seige in an age of striking social changes. H. H. Munro was to die, like many young men of his generation and class, on a battlefield in France; he was killed November 14, 1916, near Beaumont Hamel...