Literary Lapses

By Stephen Leacock

Literary Lapses was Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s first collection of comic writings, and includes such side-splitting gems as “My Financial Career,” “Society Chit-Chat,” and “Self-Made Men.” First published in 1910, Literary Lapses was an instant success, and helped cement Leacock’s reputation as one of Canada’s foremost humour writers.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443417235

Stephen Leacock

Award-winning Canadian humorist and writer Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) was the author of more than 50 literary works, and between 1915 and 1925 was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world. Leacock’s fictional works include classics like Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, and Literary Lapses. In addition to his humor writings, Leacock was an accomplished political theorist, publishing such works as Elements of Political Science and My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada, for which he won the Governor General's Award for writing in 1937. Leacock’s life continues to be commemorated through the awarding of the Leacock Medal for Humour and with an annual literary festival in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario.

Reviews for Literary Lapses

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This collection of humorous short stories by one of Canada's most famous writers was published in 1910, and it represented his first work of fiction. The best stories were moderately amusing, most notably "My Financial Career", in which a nervous man opens and closes his first bank account in one visit; "How to be a Doctor", a guide to the practice of modern medicine and the care of the patient, in which removal of various body parts is essential to forming diagnoses; and "The New Food", a description of highly concentrated food pellets and the unfortunate demise of a baby who gobbled a bottle of them at a time. Unfortunately there were far more misses than hits in this collection, which was undoubtedly more amusing a century ago than it is now.