Saki: A Life Of Hector Hugh Munro
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Bumping on spine and corners. Rubbed edges.
Behind the razor-sharp wit and darkly comic tales of Edwardian England stood a man of extraordinary contradictions — H.H. Munro, known to the literary world as Saki — and A.J. Langguth's definitive biography illuminates every facet of his singular life. Born in Burma in 1870 and raised in the repressive household of tyrannical aunts in Devon, Munro channelled his turbulent upbringing into some of the most biting, brilliantly crafted short fiction in the English language, stories that skewered the hypocrisies of upper-class society with surgical precision. This volume pairs Langguth's meticulous biographical narrative with six short stories never before collected, offering readers an unparalleled portrait of the artist alongside rare primary texts. Langguth writes with the authority of a seasoned journalist and the sensitivity of a literary scholar, reconstructing Munro's remarkable journey from miserable colonial childhood to celebrated wit of London's literary salons, and ultimately to the Western Front, where he was killed by a sniper's bullet in 1916. The biography argues compellingly that Saki's genius was inseparable from his suffering — that the cruelty, the black humour, and the predatory children that populate his fiction were born directly from his own experience of powerlessness. For anyone who has ever been startled into laughter by a Saki story and then unsettled by what that laughter reveals, this biography raises the question that no reader can resist: how much of the monster is the man?
Author: A. J. Langguth
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Bumping on spine and corners. Rubbed edges.
Behind the razor-sharp wit and darkly comic tales of Edwardian England stood a man of extraordinary contradictions — H.H. Munro, known to the literary world as Saki — and A.J. Langguth's definitive biography illuminates every facet of his singular life. Born in Burma in 1870 and raised in the repressive household of tyrannical aunts in Devon, Munro channelled his turbulent upbringing into some of the most biting, brilliantly crafted short fiction in the English language, stories that skewered the hypocrisies of upper-class society with surgical precision. This volume pairs Langguth's meticulous biographical narrative with six short stories never before collected, offering readers an unparalleled portrait of the artist alongside rare primary texts. Langguth writes with the authority of a seasoned journalist and the sensitivity of a literary scholar, reconstructing Munro's remarkable journey from miserable colonial childhood to celebrated wit of London's literary salons, and ultimately to the Western Front, where he was killed by a sniper's bullet in 1916. The biography argues compellingly that Saki's genius was inseparable from his suffering — that the cruelty, the black humour, and the predatory children that populate his fiction were born directly from his own experience of powerlessness. For anyone who has ever been startled into laughter by a Saki story and then unsettled by what that laughter reveals, this biography raises the question that no reader can resist: how much of the monster is the man?