Littera
Scripta Manet
The Written
Word Remains
On Stephen
Leacock
Peter
Gzowski
The smiling beauty of the lake, in his phrase, was to pull him so
powerfully all his life. ... He wrote voraciously wherever
he was, but much of his best work was done at Old Brewery Bay.
David Staines
Humanist and humourist, economist and educator, professor and
pundit, Leacock devoted his life to education ... perhaps most
enduringly, through his volumes of humour. "Humour is
essentially a comforter," he maintained, "reconciling us
to things as they are in contrast to things as they might
be."
Hillary
Russell
Leacock's
best writings .... provide invaluable and vivid insights into ways
of life, people, attitudes and institutions of another generation
of Canadians. The web of recognition that he spun has helped
to bind us together.
B.K.
Sandwell
A man who uses his fun to convey his wisdom, is in the line of the
great comic writers, from Aristophanes to Molière to Mark Twain.
|
|
 Stephen
Butler Leacock 1869 - 1944
|
|
 |
He was born
30 December 1869 at Swanmore, county of Hampshire, England.
In 1876 he emigrated to Canada
with his family and settled on a farm near the hamlet of Egypt,
south of Sibbald Point on Lake Simcoe.
Leacock was educated at Upper Canada College,
Toronto. He completed a degree in modern
languages at the University of Toronto in
1891.
Inspired by Thorstein Veblen's The
Theory of the Leisure Class, he enrolled at the
University of Chicago, receiving a Ph.D. in
political economy and political science under
Veblen in 1903.
Concurrently he joined the
Department of Economics and Political Science at
McGill University, Montreal.
In 1906 he published his first and most profitable
book: Elements of Political Science, a
university textbook. Twenty-seven other books
of non-fiction followed.
In 1908 he became
head of his department at McGill, helped found the
University Club and began developing Old Brewery
Bay.
The first of his thirty-five books of
humour, Literary Lapses was published in
1910. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
followed in 1912 and in 1914 Arcadian Adventures
of the Idle Rich.
Leacock was elected to
the Royal Society of Canada in 1919 and in 1921
made an extensive lecture tour of the United
Kingdom. In 1935 he received the Mark Twain
Medal. He retired from McGill in 1936.
Stephen Butler Leacock died 28 March 1944 at Toronto from
throat cancer and was buried, across the lake from
Old Brewery Bay, in the Leacock family plot at St.
George's Church, Sibbald Point.
|
|
|
|
