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Stephen Butler Leacock, Ph.D, FRSC (December 30, 1869 – March 28, 1944) was a British-Canadian writer and economist.
Early life
He was innate within Swanmore, Hampshire, England but at age 6 he & his personal moved to Canada, settling on the domestic inside Egypt, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Simcoe. When a personal got been comfortable inside England, a domestic within Georgina Township in York County was not the profits & Leacock's personal was quite unfortunate. His father Peter suffered from either alcoholism, becoming violent and sour.
Leacock, universally of visible intelligence, was sent to the elect private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he wwhen top of the class and so popular he was chosen as head son. His father left a home around 1887 & never returned. A equivalent season, seventeen season old Leacock began at University College at a University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but discovered he may not resume a ensuing season due to fiscal difficulties.
He left university to earn money as the schoolteacher -- a job he disliked immensely -- at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally within Toronto. As a teacher at UCC, his alma matter, he was take a breath to at the same half-time attend classes at U of T & earn his degree section-time inside 1891. At this early point, Leacock caught a writing bug at A Varsity, the campus newspaper.
Academic and political life
Enlightened by having teaching, around 1899 he began graduate studies at a University of Chicago where he received a doctor's degree around political science and political economy. He moved from either Chicago to Montreal where he became a lecturer & long-instance acting head of the political economy department at McGill University.
He was closely associated by having Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his demise around 1933. In point of fact, Currie experienced been the student researching Leacock's practice teaching inside Strathroy inside 1888. Within 1936, Leacock was forcibly retired per McGill Board of Governors -- an improbable prospect got Currie lived.
Leacock was two the social conservative and a partizan Conservative. He opposed women's rights & disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. He was, nevertheless, the supporter of social welfare legislation. He was the champion of the British Empire, and went in lecture tours to more a stimulator.
Although considered the federal candidate for his person, it sagely declined to invite andy skinner, lecturer & maverick to have for election. Nonetheless, he would stump for local candidates at his summertime residence.
Literary life
Although he did write conditioned articles & books related to his field of survey, his ideology is at present about forgotten. Yet, Leacock was awarded a Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work.
He presently turned to fiction, humour & short reports to supplement (& at long last exceed) his regular income. His stories, number 1 published withinside magazines in Canada & a United States and later as much as novel form became super popular around the world. It was said inside 1911 that more population experienced heard of Stephen Leacock than experienced heard of Canada.
inside a period of the summertime months, he lived at Old Brewery Bay in Orillia, Ontario, across Flow of any stream Simcoe from either in which he was raised & besides bordering Lake Couchiching. the bungalow is today a [http://www.leacockmuseum.com/ museum] & National Historic Site, and he as well let the little domestic. A gossip provided per local barber provided Leacock by owning the material which would turn into Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town which he set in the thinly-disguised Mariposa.
Death and tributes
Leacock was predeceased by his married woman & survived by his boy Stephen Jr. Inside accordance using his wishes, when his demise due to throat cancer, he was cremated and buried at Sibbald Point in Georgina Township near his boyhood house & through Flow of any stream Simcoe from either his big summertime residence.
Shorty fallowing his demise, Barbara Nimmo, his niece & literary executor & helper, promulgated ii major posthumous works: Previous Leaves & A Son We Left Behind Us. His physical bequest was less wanted, & his abandoned summertime bungalow became derelict. It was rescued from either oblivion whenever it was declared the National Historic Site in 1958 and ever since has operated as a museum known as a Stephen Leacock Memorial Residence.
Inside 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the right inside American literary humour. In the Sixties, McGill known as an arts building & the library room fallowing its easily-known prof. Around 1969, a centenary of his birth, Canada Post issued a six cent stamp using his image thereon. the resulting season, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee got a plaque erected at his English birthplace & a mountain in the Yukon was named when him.
Selected bibliography
Elements of Political Science (1906)
Practical Political Economy (1910)
Literary Lapses (1910)
Nonsensical Novels (1911)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Rustic Escapade sustaining a Idle Rich people (1914)
Moon-ray from either a Big Lunacy (1915)
A Hohenzollerns around Us (1919)
Winsome Winnie (1920)
Our Discovery of England (1922)
Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
Short (1928)
A Economic Prosperity of the British Empire (1931)
A Son I personally Left Behind Pine tree state (1946)
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