Stephen Leacock

Stephen Butler Leacock (born in Swanmore, England, in 1869; died in Toronto in 1944) was a Canadian humourist, economist and political scientist who wrote in English. Between 1915 and 1925 he was the most popular humour writer in the English-speaking world, and his name is still tied to the comic tradition of North America, although his scholarly work has largely been forgotten.

He was born into a family of some means, but his childhood was unsettled. When he was six, his parents took the family to a farm in Ontario that never became profitable, and much of their income came from his paternal grandfather. His father drank heavily and left the household more than once. Leacock attended the prestigious Upper Canada College in Toronto, but financial problems forced him to leave university. He worked as a teacher, a job he disliked, finished his degree in 1891 while still teaching, and later earned a doctorate in political science and political economy at Chicago.

From Chicago he moved to Montreal, where he headed the economics department at McGill University. His academic books and textbooks are of interest today mainly to historians of economic thought. His literary career began as a way to supplement his income: he wrote stories, humorous pieces and short sketches for magazines in Canada and the United States. Collected into books, these pieces made him famous. His humour relied on absurdity, satire of small-town life and irony about middle-class pretensions.

Leacock encouraged younger writers such as Robert Benchley, urging him to collect his pieces into a book. His influence reached American comedians such as Jack Benny, who said he had admired him for decades. His politics were conservative in many respects, a point historians now debate, though he also supported social welfare measures. In Canada his name survives chiefly through the annual humour award that bears it, which honours the country's comic writing.