Mike and Psmith P. G. Wodehouse – Pelham Grenville Wodehouse on born on 15th October, 1881 in Guildford, England to distinguished parents who were visiting the UK from Hong Kong where his father was a magistrate.
After two years in Hong Kong Wodehouse and his two brothers were sent back to England to live and be schooled.
Failing family finances meant that Wodehouse did not go on to University but began work straight away. He wrote in the evenings and during a two-year stint as a bank clerk managed to have over 80 pieces published. With the publication of his first book ‘The Pothunters’ in 1902 he devoted himself full time to writing.
His career was both prolific and commercially successful. Whether it was novels, short stories or plays everything seemed to be a hit.
His wonderful characterisation of the English upper classes combined with his mastery of prose left a lasting legacy most notably in his series of the humorous, and sometimes hilarious, Jeeves and Wooster stories that are at the pinnacle of comic writing and continue to be widely read and enjoyed.
Despite controversy over his broadcasts for the Germans during World War Two, which stemmed more from naivety than any possible Nazi sympathies, but which left a lingering stain against his name, he continued to write although with diminishing success.
P G Wodehouse died on 14th February 1975 in the United States.
n Evelyn Waugh’s book _Decline and Fall_ his legend, applying for a post as a schoolmaster, is told by the specialist, ‘We class schools in four grades-driving school, top notch school, great school, and school. Sedleigh in Mike and Psmith would, I assume, come into the last-named class, however not exactly as low in it as Mr. Waugh’s Llanabba. It is one of those little English schools with yearnings one day to have the option to put ‘public’ before their name and to have their director qualified to go to the yearly Headmaster’s Conference. All it needs is a couple more Adairs to get things moving. Also, there is this to be noted, that even at a ‘school’ one gets magnificent training. Its as it were disadvantage is that it doesn’t play the main schools or the principal rate schools or even the great schools at cricket. In any case, to Mike, traight from Wrykyn (a ‘top notch school’) and Psmith.
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Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse’s main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.
An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O’Casey famously called him ‘English literature’s performing flea’, a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.
Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern’s Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
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