P.G. Wodehouse

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, known to family and friends as “Plum,” was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. He was born in Guildford, Surrey, on 15 October 1881, the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, and Eleanor Wodehouse. Although much of his fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, Wodehouse spent much of his life in the United States, and New York and Hollywood became settings for some of his novels and short stories.

Wodehouse is best known for a comic world filled with instantly recognizable figures: the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves; the immaculate and talkative Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, teller of golf stories; and Mr. Mulliner, whose tall tales range from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls. His output was immense. Between 1902 and 1974 he published more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories, and other writings.

His path to writing began after school. Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving, he worked at a bank, disliked it, and wrote in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later turned to comic fiction. During and after the First World War, he wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, work that played an important part in the development of the American musical. In the early 1930s he wrote for MGM in Hollywood; in 1931, a candid interview about incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore.

The habits behind Wodehouse’s lightness were exacting. He often had two or more books in preparation at once, and could spend up to two years building a plot and writing a scenario of about thirty thousand words before composing the story itself. Early on he could produce a novel in about three months; in old age, the work slowed to about six months. His style mixed Edwardian slang, literary quotations and allusions, and comic techniques so deftly that it has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy.

His life was also marked by controversy. In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons. In 1940, at Le Touquet, he was taken prisoner by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After release, he made five comic, apolitical broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the United States, which had not yet entered the war. The broadcasts brought anger and controversy in Britain, as well as a threat of prosecution, and Wodehouse never returned to England.

From 1947 until his death, Wodehouse lived in the United States; he became a US citizen in 1955 while retaining his British citizenship. He died on 14 February 1975 in Southampton, New York, at the age of 93, one month after being awarded a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire. Some critics called his work flippant, but his admirers included former British prime ministers and many fellow writers. His sentences still please readers because they are built with care, mischief, and a rare confidence in the comic possibilities of language.