Born in England, Leacock was educated at Upper Canada College and at the Universities of Toronto and Chicago. He spent the greater part of his career at McGill, teaching and publishing in the fields of history and political science. It is, however, as a humorist that he is chiefly known and among a considerable volume of writings, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) is the work that assured him a reputation throughout the English-speaking world. The peculiar charm of his work lies in the evocations, through exaggeration and the identification of incongruities, of the humour of ordinary people in commonplace situations.