Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Affectionately combining both the idyllic and ironic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a colourful, imaginative, and thoroughly entertaining portrait of small town Ontario. This is Stephen Leacock at his best.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, which first appeared as a newspaper serial, chronicles life in the fictional community of Mariposa, modelled on Orillia, Ontario, where Stephen Leacock spent many summers. It's a brilliant satire about small towns, small-town people, and small-town occurrences.

Life in Mariposa is never dull or ordinary. It's a town full of eccentrics, where boats sent to rescue passengers from a sinking steamer have to be rescued themselves, where the leading citizen is a 280-pound illiterate saloonkeeper, and where a barber who stumbles into a fortune is heralded as a financial wizard.  

STEPHEN LEACOCK was born in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, in 1869. His family emigrated to Canada in 1876 and settled on a farm north of Toronto. Educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, Leacock pursued graduate studies in economics at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Thorstein Veblen. Even before he completed his doctorate, Leacock accepted a position as sessional lecturer in political science and economics at McGill University. From 1908 until his retirement in 1936, he chaired the Department of Political Science and Economics. The author of nineteen books and countless articles on economics, history, and political science, Leacock turned to the writing of humour as his beloved avocation. His first collection of comic stories, Literary Lapses, appeared in 1910, and from that time until his death he published a volume of humour almost every year.