Stephen Butler Leacock was born in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, in 1869. When he was six his family emigrated to Canada, settling on a farm near Sutton, Ontario, south of Lake Simcoe. Leacock was educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto. He received a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Chicago in 1903, and thereafter became a professor of economics and political science at McGill University in Montreal, where he would teach until his retirement. In 1900 he married Beatrix Hamilton, an aspiring actress; their son, Stephen Lushington, was born in 1915. Leacock's first book, Elements of Political Science, became a standard university text and was his bestselling book during his lifetime. He wrote several books on economics, politics, and history, among which are The Unsolved Riddle of Social Injustice, Canada: The Foundations of Its Future, and While There Is Time: The Case Against Social Catastrophe. He also wrote biographies of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. But Leacock's lasting fame would come from his comic writings. His first, Literary Lapses, is a compilation of magazine pieces; it was a great success and paved the way for the many books that followed, including Nonsense Novels, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, Frenzied Fiction, Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels, My Discovery of England, and Too Much College. The work for which he is best known, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was published in 1912. Leacock, one of Canada's most prolific writers, was also a charismatic public speaker, touring widely giving lectures and readings from his work. Leacock died in 1944 in Toronto.