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Stephen Butler Leacock, Ph.D , FRSC was a Canadian writer and economist.
Early lifeBorn in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, at the age of six years old Leacock and his family moved to Canada, settling on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been comfortable in England, the farm in Georgina Township of York County was not a success and Leacock's family was quite poor. His father Peter indulged himself with alcoholism.
Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he was top of the class and was chosen as head boy. His father left the house in 1887 and never returned. The same year, seventeen year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year due to financial difficulties.
He left university to earn money as a school teacher - a job he disliked immensely - at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto.
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Quotations
The Lord said Let there be wheat and Saskatchewan was born.
Source: My Discovery of America, 1937
The rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence.
Source: Ibid.
My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
On leaving England at age seven. Source: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.
On achieving fame in Canada. Source: Three Score and Ten
With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.
Source: My Discovery of the West, 1937
Encyclopedia
Stephen Butler Leacock, Ph.D , FRSC was a Canadian writer and economist.
Early lifeBorn in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, at the age of six years old Leacock and his family moved to Canada, settling on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been comfortable in England, the farm in Georgina Township of York County was not a success and Leacock's family was quite poor. His father Peter indulged himself with alcoholism.
Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he was top of the class and was chosen as head boy. His father left the house in 1887 and never returned. The same year, seventeen year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year due to financial difficulties.
He left university to earn money as a school teacher - a job he disliked immensely - at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he was able to simultaneously attend classes at the University of Toronto and, in 1891, earn his degree through part-time studies. It was during this period that his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper.
Academic and political lifeDisillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago where he received a doctorate in political science and political economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois to Montreal, Quebec where he became a lecturer and long-time acting head of the political economy department at McGill University.
He was closely associated with Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his death in 1933. In fact, Currie had been a student observing Leacock's practice teaching in Strathroy in 1888. In 1936, Leacock was forcibly retired by the McGill Board of Governors -- an unlikely prospect had Currie lived.
Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed women's rights and disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. He was, however, a supporter of social welfare legislation. He was a champion of the British Empire, and went on lecture tours to further the cause.
Although he was considered as a federal candidate for his party, it declined to invite the author, lecturer and maverick to stand for election. Nevertheless, he would stump for local candidates at his summer home.
Literary lifeEarly in his career Leacock turned to fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in novel form became extremely popular around the world. It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. Also, between the years 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world.
During the summer months, he lived at Old Brewery Bay in Orillia, across Lake Simcoe from where he was raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching. The cottage is now a and National Historic Site, and he also let a small farm. Gossip provided by the local barber, Jefferson Short, provided Leacock with the material which would become Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), set in the thinly-disguised Mariposa.
Although he wrote learned articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory is now all but forgotten. Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work.
Death and tributesLeacock was predeceased by his wife and survived by his son Stephen Jr. In accordance with his wishes, after his death due to throat cancer, he was cremated and buried at Sibbald Point in Georgina Township near his boyhood home and across Lake Simcoe from his adult summer home.
Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor and benefactor, published two major posthumous works: Last Leaves (1945) and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His physical legacy was less treasured, and his abandoned summer cottage became derelict. It was rescued from oblivion when it was declared a National Historic Site in 1958 and ever since has operated as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Memorial Home.
In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the best in Canadian literary humour. In 1969, the centennial of his birth, Canada Post issued a six cent stamp with his image on it. The following year, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee had a plaque erected at his English birthplace and a mountain in the Yukon was named after him.
A number of buildings in Canada are named after Leacock, including the Stephen Leacock Building at McGill University, a theatre in Keswick, Ontario, and schools in Toronto and Ottawa.
Screen adaptationsTwo Leacock short stories have been adapted as National Film Board of Canada animated shorts by Gerald Potterton: My Financial Career and The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones.
Bibliography- Elements of Political Science (1906)
- Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)
- Practical Political Economy (1910)
- Literary Lapses (1910)
- Nonsense Novels (1911)
- Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
- Behind the Beyond (1913)
- Adventurers of the Far North (1914)
- The Dawn of Canadian History (1914)
- The Mariner of St. Malo (1914)
- Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
- Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
- Essays and Literary Sudies (1916)
- Further Foolishness (1916)
- Frenzied Fiction (1918)
- The Hohenzollerns in America (1919)
- Winsome Winnie (1920)
- The Unsolved Riddle of Social Injustice (1920)
- My Discovery of England (1922)
- College Days (1923)
- Over the Footlights (1923)
- The Garden of Folly (1924)
- Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)
- Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
- Short Circuits (1928)
- The Iron Man and the Tin Woman (1929)
- Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)
- The Economic Prosperity of the British Empire (1931)
- The Dry Pickwick (1932)
- Afternoons in Utopia (1932)
- Mark Twain (1932)
- Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)
- Humour: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples (1935)
- Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)
- Funny Pieces (1936)
- The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)
- Here Are My Lectures (1937)
- Humour and Humanity (1937)
- My Discovery of the West (1937)
- Model Memoirs (1938)
- Too Much College (1939)
- The British Empire (1940)
- Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)
- My Remarkeable Uncle (1942)
- Our Heritage of Liberty (1942)
- Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)
- Happy Stories (1943)
- How to Write (1943)
- Canada and the Sea (1944)
- While There Is Time (1945)
- Last Leaves (1945)
- The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)
- Wet Wit and Dry Humor
- Laugh with Leacock
- Back to Prosperity
- The Greatest Pages of Charles Dickens
- Essays and Literary Studies
Quotes- "Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions." -- Nonsense Novels, "Gertrude the Governess", 1911
- "Professor Leacock has made more people laugh with the written word than any other living author. One may say he is one of the greatest jesters, the greatest humorist of the age." – A. P. Herbert
- "Mr Leacock is as 'bracing' as the seaside place of John Hassall's famous poster. His wisdom is always humorous, and his humour is always wise." – Sunday Times
- "He is still inimitable. No one, anywhere in the world, can reduce a thing to ridicule with such few short strokes. He is the Grock of literature." – Evening Standard
External links- National Library of Canada
- National Library of Canada
- National Library of Canada
- National Library of Canada
- CBC Radio Adaptation 1946
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