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Photograph of Stephen Leacock

Black and white photograph of Stephen Leacock outdoors, laughing with his farm hat in hand, circa 1941

Image found in James Doyle’s 1995 paperback, Stephen Leacock: The Sage of Orillia. Part of OMAH’s permanent Collection.
Information sourced from canadianencyclopedia.ca

Stephen Leacock was born in Swanmore, England, and was the third of eleven children. He emigrated to Canada at the age of six to settle on a hundred acre farm near Lake Simcoe in Orillia, Ontario.

A prolific writer of humorous fiction, literary essays and articles on social issues, politics, economics, science and history, one of Leacock’s masterpieces is Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). The book humorously anatomizes business, social life, religion, romance and politics in the typical, small Canadian town of Mariposa.

In 1928, he moved to Old Brewery Bay in Orillia, where he built a house that was later converted into a museum and was declared a National Historic Site in 1992.