Stephen Butler Leacock

Stephen Butler Leacock (1869-1944), Canadian writer and economist, born in Swanmore, England. As a child, he emigrated to Canada with his family; later he was educated at the universities of Toronto and Chicago. From 1903 to 1936 he taught at McGill University. Leacock wrote several books on political science and economics, as well as the biographies Mark Twain (1932) and Charles Dickens (1933). He is best known for his essays, parodies, and short stories, in which he strikes a rich vein of burlesque and satiric nonsense. Among such works are Literary Lapses (1910), Nonsense Novels (1911), Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), and Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915). His uncompleted autobiography, The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946), was published posthumously.