Nonsense Novels sends up the silliest conventions of the ghost story, the detective story, the rags-to-riches story, the adventure story, the shipwreck story, and, of course, the story itself. Among other things. Here the close cultivation of cliche yields a bumper crop of absurdity and the utterly ludicrous turns up at every new twist of the tale.About the AuthorStephen Butler Leacock, Ph.D , FRSC (30 December 1869 - 28 March 1944) was a Canadian writer and economist.Born in Swanmore, Hampshire, England, at age six Leacock and his family moved to Canada, settling on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been comfortable in England, the farm in Georgina Township of York County was not a success and Leacock"s family was quite poor. His father Peter suffered from alcoholism, becoming a violent alcoholic.Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he was top of the class and so popular he was chosen as head boy. His father left the house in 1887 and never returned. The same year, seventeen year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year due to financial difficulties.He left university to earn money as a schoolteacher - a job he disliked immensely - at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he was able to simultaneously attend classes at the University of Toronto and, in 1891, earn his degree through part-time studies. It was during this period that his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper. (Quote from wikipedia.org)