The Clockmaker — Or, the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville

When Sam Slick, a Connecticut clock peddler with a silver tongue and an insatiable love for horses, drags his English companion on a tour of early nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the results are catastrophic for anyone with pretensions to dignity. This collection of thirty-three satirical sketches, first published in 1835-36, launched Canadian literature onto the world stage and created one of the most enduring characters in North American fiction. Slick observes everything, the economy, the politics, the local gentry, the farmers, the clergy, and dissects it all with a sharpness that leaves no ego unbruised. His sayings became so famous that the book was published in response to public demand, and his dialect ('Wa'al, I guess') became instantly recognizable across the English-speaking world. What elevates these sketches beyond period piece is their restless energy and their willingness to mock everyone equally: pompous British officials, gullible Nova Scotians, and Americans too. Haliburton essentially invented a distinctly North American humor, crude, quick, democratic, that would eventually flow through Mark Twain and beyond.