Stephen Leacock

Purchasing options for Self-Made Men have been determined after much reflection and many wrong turns. Straight to the point—you can now purchase a real book that can be held, smelled, and shelved or, if you actually prefer a screen, you can view or download a PDF version at no charge to you. Of course, after seeing the free PDF you might decide to purchase a real book you can hold, smell, and shelve or maybe gift to a person that you love or hate. I am okay with that. Either or both are fine. Whatever you want to do. That will be your choice.

Perhaps you live to be 200 by living an unconventional life. Okay, that won’t work for everyone and it didn’t work for Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (December 30, 1869 – March 28, 1944). But he did in fact live unconventionally. For at brief intervals throughout his adult life, he stopped thinking altogether. By his own account he never tired of being mentally inert, but he did find it impossible to earn a living in that state of mind, so he regularly left it and resumed professing political economy and chairing the Economics and Political Science Department at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Oh, and in the cracks of time that arose while doing these jobs, he also wrote books, essays, and articles on economic theory (and yes, humorous fiction—the only pursuit from which he would earn notable money and recognition). Among his works of humorous fiction are essays like the six we present in our illustrated collection, Self-Made Men, Six Humorous Essays by Stephen Leacock. But then, whenever opportunities presented him with a large enough interval of time, he reentered inertia, his preferred state of being.

The six humorous, illustrated essays in the soon-to-be-published Self-Made Men by Stephen Leacock are drawn from three separate sources of Leacock material. The title essay, Self-Made Men, was published in 1910 in a collection of essays titled Literary Lapses. This was Leacock’s first venture into collecting and self-publishing his humorous essays, all of which had been first published in a variety of magazines. It was an immediate success, garnering him praise and then a contract with a book publisher. From this first venture he proceeded to have an extremely successful career, mainly writing humorous fiction, but also other works. Between the years 1915 and 1925 he was the most popular humorist in the English speaking world.

   Way up north there was once a Canuck humorist by the name of Stephen Leacock who, as a practicing humorist, was comparable to Mark Twain. Yes indeed, he was. Just as worthy comedians and humorists in the USA are annually awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, worthy humor writers in Canada are annually awarded the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. And yet, despite his grand reputation, many avid readers in the USA and elsewhere have never heard of Mr. Leacock.