ASSIGNMENT NO3

ASSIGNMENT NO. 03

English Writers

Hector Hugh Munro
Mark Twain

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916):
He is 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 satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
Besides 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 and occupation of Britain.

Mark Twain:
Mark Twain is a central figure in American literature. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, his finest work, in the story of a journey down the Mississippi by two memorable figures, a white boy and black slave. Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 and was raised in Hannibal, Missouri. During his early years, he worked as a riverboat pilot, newspaper reporter , printer, and gold prospector.
Although his popular image is as the author of such comic works as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and The Prince and The Pauper , Twain had a darker side that may have resulted from the bitter experiences of his life : financial failure and the death of his wife and daughter. His last writing is savage, satiric, and pessimistic. The following selection is taken from Letters from the Earth , one of his lat works. It has been under the title The Damned Human Race and has been printed in numerous essay anthologies.
Did today’s newspaper feather headlines about people fighting somewhere in the world (Iraq Afghanistan, Africa)? Most likely, it did. In the following selection, Mark Twain concludes that the combative and cruel nature of human beings makes them the lowest of creatures, not the highest. With scathing irony, he supplies a startling a startling reason for human’s warlike nature.