Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

The name of Canadian humorist writer Stephen Leacock is well known in our country. A lively and witty narrator, an inexhaustible inventor of comic situations and characters, Leacock wrote an enormous number of humorous short stories, essays, and parodies—along with a novel, “Dollar Hunters,” built in the form of a chain of stories linked by common heroes. The light, easy-going humor permeating the narration gives the book its special character.

The action takes place in a small town in the north of the American continent. In the town, there hangs a “spirit of making money.” All the heroes are businessmen who develop frenetic activity, trying to improve their financial situation. Businessmen join forces with religion’s businessmen to merge the episcopal and presbyterian churches into one enterprise and collect profits into a common pot; political businessmen create the “League for the Struggle for Honesty, Purity, and Unbribability” and organize “clean and untainted” elections…