P. G. Wodehouse

Biography

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) was an English-born humorist, novelist, and playwright whose comic fiction remains among the most celebrated in the English language. Born in Guildford, Surrey, he spent much of his childhood in the care of relatives while his parents served in Hong Kong, an experience that shaped his later portrayals of eccentric English family life. Educated at Dulwich College, where he excelled in classics and cricket, Wodehouse briefly worked at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank before devoting himself to writing full-time. His literary career spanned over seventy years and produced more than ninety books, as well as numerous short stories, plays, lyrics, and screenplays. He is best remembered for creating the incomparable valet Jeeves and his amiable but dim employer Bertie Wooster, the sprawling world of Blandings Castle presided over by the absent-minded Earl of Emsworth, and the irrepressible schemer Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. His prose style--marked by elaborate similes, mock-heroic language, and impeccable comic timing--has been praised by writers from Hilaire Belloc to Evelyn Waugh, who called him the greatest living English writer. Wodehouse became an American citizen in 1955 and spent his later decades in Remsenburg, New York. Despite controversy surrounding wartime broadcasts from Berlin, his reputation recovered fully. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year Honours, just weeks before his death at the age of ninety-three. His influence on comic writing, from television sitcoms to literary satire, endures to this day.