Although known as a social scientist of some reputation, Leo Calvin Rosten is best recognized as a humorist who often writes under the pseudonyms Leonard Ross and Leonard Q. Ross. His extraordinarily popular first book, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N , earned comparisons to the comic works of Dickens and Shakespeare. That book is also the keynote of a prolific career which includes ethnic humor, melodramas, screenplays, and writings on economics, social science, and lexicography. No matter what the literary form, Rosten's persistent subject is what his malaprop-cursed, mispronouncing, unwitting character, Hyman Kaplan, calls "good English." Rosten's interest and comic talents are consistently engaged in presenting the mysteries, misuses, and vagaries of language as spoken and written by fallible beings.

Rosten was born in Lodz, Poland, to Samuel C. and Ida Freundlich Rosten and was brought at the age of...