B.A.

Stephen (Butler) Leacock was born in Swanmoor, Hampshire, on December 30, 1869, and came to Canada in 1876. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Strathroy Collegiate Institute, and the University of Toronto (B.A. 1891). He taught modern languages at Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1889 to 1899. Then he undertook graduate studies at the University of Chicago and obtained his PhD in 1903. He lectured at McGill University's Department of Economics and Political Science from 1903 to 1936, as chair of the department from 1908. In 1906 he published Elements of Political Science (Boston: Houghton; B-10 1058 Fisher Rare Book Library): it was successful and went into a new edition in 1921. He was known and loved, internationally, as a humorist. Literary Lapses: A Book of Sketches (1910), Nonsense Novels (1911), Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) were just the first of his 40-odd popular books. In 1936, when he retired from McGill, he spoke out on the Great Depression, and the immense suffering it caused millions of Canadians, by publishing The Gathering Financial Crisis in Canada: A Survey of the Present Critical Situation and his only book of verse, on the same subject, Hellements of Hickonomics, in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill. The title of the second book plays with the title of his first book, the 1906 study on which his scholarly reputation was based. Politically, Leacock was a Conservative, but by 1936 he came to believe that the government should act in times of financial hardship to protect families. Leacock received many honours in his lifetime, including the Lorne Pierce Medal from the Royal Society of Canada and the Mark Twain Medal. He died of throat cancer on March 28, 1944. The Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour was established in his honour in 1947. See also Gerhard Richard Lomer's Stephen Leacock: A Check-list and Index of his Writings (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1954; Z 8494 .L6); Albert Frank and Teresa Moritz, Leacock: A Biography (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985; PS 8523 E2Z78); and Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1986; PS 8523 E2Z8 Robarts Library).

Poet and literary journalist, Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, attended Rutgers and obtained his A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1908, and married Aline Murray the same year. They had four children, and during this time Kilmer became a Roman Catholic. By 1913, he was working on the Sunday magazine and book-review sections of the New York Times, but his first book of poems, Trees and Other Poems (1914), quickly established his reputation as a popular religious poet. He enlisted in the New York National Guard and died in the 165th Regiment of the Rainbow Division at the second Battle of the Marne on July 30, 1918. He received a posthumous Croix de Guerre and was buried in France. In that year Robert Cortes Holliday brought out a memoir with Kilmer's poems (reprinted in 1968 by Kennikat Press), but a fuller life appears in the autobiography of his mother, Annie Kilburn Kilmer, Leaves from My Life (New York: Frye, 1925; PS 3521 I38Z65 Robarts Library). Miriam A. Kilmer, the poet's granddaughter and child of his son Kenton, edits most of Joyce's poems on an attractive, informative Web site at www.risingdove.com/risingdove/literaturesite.asp. I am grateful to Miriam Kilmer for a correction to the RPO Kilmer selection.

Born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up and was educated in Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio. He briefly enrolled in Columbia University in New York in 1921, the year that he published "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in Crisis, a journal which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1923-24 Hughes worked as a seaman on trips to Africa and Europe. In April 1925 his poem "The Weary Blues" won first prize in a contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine. This notice led Alfred A. Knopf to bring out Hughes' first book of poems, The Weary Blues collection, in January 1926. It established him as a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance. In a life not without political turmoil, Hughes became a prolific playwright, short-story writer, opera composer, novelist, biographer, editor, and historian. Among his books of poems are Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), The Dream Keeper (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), One-way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), and The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (1967). Following his visit to Russia in the 1930s, Hughes was frequently attacked for supposed communist sympathies. In 1953 he testified before Senator Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee on subversive activities in 1953 but escaped censure. He received the Spingarn Medal in 1960, the highest honour awarded by the NAACP, and in 1961 was made a member in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). Always a supporter of other writers, from imprisoned Ezra Pound to Alice Walker, Hughes edited several important anthologies of black poetry: with Arna Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949 (1949), and Poems from Black Africa, Ethiopia, and Other Countries (1963). Alfred A. Knopf brought out his Selected Poems in 1959. He died on May 22, 1967, in Manhattan.

• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Random House, 1994; PS 3515 U274 A17 Robarts Library)
• Mikolyzk, Thomas A., comp. Langston Hughes: a bio-bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990; Z 8423.3 M53 1990 Robarts Library)
• Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-88; PS 3515 U274Z698 Robarts Library)

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes proceeded to Phillips Academy and Harvard, from which he graduated in 1829. His first, most popular poem, written at 21, was "Old Ironsides." Like most of Holmes' poems, this was an occasional piece, prompted by some incident. After his degree, he studied in Boston, Harvard, and Paris medical schools before graduating with a Harvard M.D. in 1835. He published Poems the next year. His career then turned to medical writing and teaching with his appointment as a professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1838, and firmed up when he became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, and Dean, at Harvard Medical School in 1847. Holmes kept up his old love of literature, serializing his The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in the Atlantic Monthly and then bringing it out as a book in 1858. This included what Holmes reasonably believed to be his best poems, "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful `One-Hoss-Shay.'" Composition never prevented Holmes from literary criticism. In 1853 he delivered a dozen lectures on the English poets at the Lovell Institute in Boston, and in 1872 the third of his "Breakfast-Table" books was published, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Besides issuing enlarged editions of his 1836 Poems, he published four subsequent volumes, Songs in Many Keys (1862), Songs of Many Seasons (1875), The Iron Gate, and Other Poems (1880), and Before the Curfew and Other Poems (1887). He wrote three novels that took advantage of his medical knowledge. His collected poems came out from Cambridge in 1895. Holmes died in Boston on October 7, 1894. His marriage to Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840 produced three children, one of whom (his namesake) became a justice of the Supreme Court. See also

• Currier, Thomas Franklin. A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ed. Eleanor M. Tilton. New York: University Press, for the Bibliographical Society of America, 1953. Z 8414.3 .C8 Robarts Library.
• Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947). PS 1981 T5 Robarts Library

Arthur Clement Hilton was born in 1851 and educated at Marlborough College and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he published in 1872 The Light Green, a collection of verse parodies. After graduating from Wells Theological College in January 1873, Hilton was ordained deacon on March 1, 1874, became curate of St. Clement and St. Mary, Sandwich, and was ordained priest in 1875. He took his M.A. at Cambridge in 1876 and died suddenly and unexpectedly April 3, 1877. It was not until 1902 that his collected works were published.