Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
A small town in Ontario is described by a narrator who insists that nothing important happens there, and then proceeds to show that everything does. Leacock based the town on Orillia, where he spent summers, and the sketches are affectionate rather than satirical.
The humour is dry and structural: a bank that cannot fail, a political meeting that dissolves, a romance conducted entirely through misunderstanding. Leacock was a professor of economics, and the jokes about money and civic pride are informed by that. It is the funniest Canadian book of the period, and one of the least cruel.
Public-domain status
First published in 1912. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Stephen Leacock died in 1944, so this work has been free to republish there since 2015.
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Keep reading
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