P.G. Wodehouse

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, better known as P.G. Wodehouse, was an English author and humorist born on October 15, 1881, in Guildford. He is widely regarded as one of the most celebrated humorists of the 20th century, with a writing career that spanned over seventy years. His works continue to be widely read and admired more than four decades after his death.

Wodehouse was born to a British magistrate based in Hong Kong and spent his teenage years at Dulwich College, where he developed a love for writing. After working at a bank, he decided to pursue a career in writing, initially focusing on school stories before transitioning to comic fiction. He created several beloved characters, including the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; the feeble-minded Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the loquacious Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and the equally loquacious Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on various subjects.

Although most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in England, he spent a significant portion of his life in the United States and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. During and after the First World War, Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern collaborated on a series of Broadway musical comedies, contributing to the development of the American musical. In the 1930s, Wodehouse worked in Hollywood for MGM and later made broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which caused controversy in Britain. He never returned to England and lived in the US from 1947 until his death in 1975, becoming a dual British-American citizen in 1955. Wodehouse published more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories, and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He was known for his unique prose style, which combined Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and various literary techniques.