English, Scottish, & Welsh Fiction, Short Story Collections (Single Author), Peoples & Cultures - Humor, Humorous Fiction, Character Types - Fiction

P. G. Wodehouse

Name: P. G. Wodehouse
Author: P.G. Wodehouse
ISBN: 9780736639880

by P.G. Wodehouse

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Overview

At the time of his death at the age of 93, P.G. Wodehouse was at work on his 97th novel. This unique writer of social comedy, with his outlandish humor and sharp caricatures of English types, was born in 1881 in Guildford, England. In novels and short stories, he created such memorable characters as Psmith and Jeeves, the archetypical Edwardian drone and his butler.

The universality of his appeal is demonstrated in these six stories: "Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend," "Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit," "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate," "Mulliner's Buck U Uppo," "Anselm Gets His Chance" and "The Clicking of Cuthbert" (a golfer's delight).

About the Author, P.G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse

Comic timing would seem less of the essence in literature until you read the English wit of P. G. Wodehouse, who shows just how a well-placed comment or properly inflected phrase can create a response that is often all too rare during a reading session: A loud, hearty laugh.

Biography

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in 1881 in Guildford, the son of a civil servant, and educated at Dulwich College. He spent a brief period working for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank before abandoning finance for writing, earning a living by journalism and selling stories to magazines.

An enormously popular and prolific writer, he produced about 100 books. In Jeeves, the ever resourceful "gentleman's personal gentleman", and the good-hearted young blunderer Bertie Wooster, he created two of the best known and best loved characters in twentieth century literature. Their exploits, first collected in Carry On, Jeeves, were chronicled in fourteen books, and have been repeatedly adapted for television, radio and the stage. Wodehouse also created many other comic figures, notably Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, Psmith and the numerous members of the Drones Club. He was part-author and writer of fifteen straight plays and 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies. The Times hailed him as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce."

P. G. Wodehouse said, "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn ...."

Wodehouse married in 1914 and took American citizenship in 1955. He was created a Knight of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. In a BBC interview he said that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted and there was a waxwork of him in Madame Tussaud's. He died on St. Valentine's Day, 1975, at the age of ninety-three.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Books LTD.