Lafcadio Hearn was one of the first great interpreters of things Japanese for Western readers. His keen intellect, poetic imagination and clear style have ensured him a devoted readership for more than a century.
H. H. Munro, better known as "Saki," was born in Burma, the son of an inspector-general for the Burmese police. Sent to England to be educated at the Bedford Grammar School, he returned to Burma in 1893 and joined the police force there. In 1896, he returned again to England and began writing first for The Westminster Gazette and then as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post. Best known for his wry and amusing stories, Saki depicts a world of drawing rooms, garden parties, and exclusive club rooms. His short stories at their best are extraordinarily compact and cameolike, wicked and witty, with a careless cruelty and a powerful vein of supernatural fantasy. They deal, in general,… with the same group of upper-class Britishers, whose frivolous lives are sometimes complicated by animals---the talking cat who reveals their treacheries in love, the pet ferret who is evil incarnate. The nom de plume "Saki" was borrowed from the cupbearer in Omar Khayyam's (see Vol. 2) The Rubaiyat. Munro used it for political sketches contributed to the Westminster Gazette as early as 1896, later collected as Alice in Westminster. The stories and novels were published between that time and the outbreak of World War I, when he enlisted as a private, scorning a commission. He died of wounds from a sniper's bullet while in a shell hole near Beaumont-Hamel. One of his characters summed up Saki's stories as those that "are true enough to be interesting and not true enough to be tiresome."
(Helen) Beatrix Potter, 1866 - 1943 (Helen) Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 in London where she was privately educated. During most of her adult life, she lived in a farm cottage in Sawrey, Westmoreland County. She was unsuccessful in trying to publish her serious botanical work, watercolor studies of fungi, but she wrote and privately published "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" for an invalid child in 1900. This story became a children's classic throughout the world. Other animal characters created by her include, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Her tales are illustrated by her own hand in delicate and detailed watercolor pictures depicting her characters. Potter's… other works include "The Tailor of Gloucester" published in 1902 and "The Tale of Tom Kitten" published in 1907. At her death in 1943, she bequeathed her property in Sawrey to the National Trust, which also maintains her home as a museum.
O. Henry is the pen name of William Sidney Porter, who was born on September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Porter was a licensed pharmacist and worked on a sheep ranch in Texas. He was a draftsman for the General Land Office and a teller for the First National Bank of Texas. He was convicted of embezzlement and eventually served five years in prison. While in prison, he began writing short stories under his pseudonym and eventually wrote over 300. As O. Henry, Porter is one of America's best known writers, and his stories, such as "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief", are still taught in schools. In 1918, the O. Henry Awards, an annual anthology of short stories,… was established in his honor. Porter died on June 5, 1910.