ALWAYS KNOWN as P.G. or Plum, Wodehouse was born on St. Valentine’s Day, an entirely propitious and accurate sign of his life’s work as an apostle of crystal clear comedy.  He was educated at London’s Dulwich College, home of a magnificent art collection and educational cradle of other famous writers and sages.  He started in banking but was drawn to journalism and the endless possibilities open in popular literature to a comic visionary.  He wrote the best English prose of anyone in the twentieth century, and he had a 100% infallible ear for demotic speech, which he forged into flawless satiric dialogue.

Now best remembered for his scores of brilliant comic stories and novels (especially the superb Jeeves and Wooster yarns), in his lifetime also revered as a master of lyrics and talk for classic Broadway musicals, partnered with librettist Guy Bolton and musicians as superb as Jerome Kern.  He wrote hundreds of pop songs when American pop music first conquered the world.  His songs, like his stories, were lightly ironic and self-conscious but nonetheless absolutely pure specimens of zesty, peppy pop-culture trivia from the youth of modernity.  Among landmarks he contributed to the musical theatre are standards such as “Bill,” from Show Boat, the whole book for Anything Goes and dozens of other songs and books for major shows.  He spent the middle years of his life shuttling between London and New York and alternating theatre work with his endless flow of books and stories (around 100 volumes by the end of his life!).

His novels include series on the super-valet Jeeves, on Psmith, a shambling anti-hero, on the assorted denizens of Blandings Castle and others.  He also wrote better than anyone else on golf, in the Golden Age of Plus-Fours (pants—not a handicap!).  He possessed a bottomless well of original wit and a rococo sense of plot and event that make his stories as intricate as a child prodigy’s Tinkertoy construct and as limpidly self-revealing as a Faberge egg. He wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers  and other glossy magazines, and his tales were virtually memorized by college students in the Jazz Age.

During World War II Wodehouse, a classic innocent, was interned by the Nazis on the continent and hornswoggled into making propaganda broadcasts for the Axis.  He was reviled by the beleaguered British and despised when repatriated at war’s end.  Surprisingly, that dour and honest broker of literature and politics, George Orwell, wrote an impassioned and brilliant essay, “In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse,” that did much to rescue his reputation, but Wodehouse—the most ur-British of British Gents— felt uncomfortable in England ever after.  He continued to write prolifically, employing the same limitless sunshine comedy, but he became an American citizen in 1955.  In 1975, just before his death, he received a knighthood, decades overdue.  He had always in spirit been a dual citizen of Britain and the U.S., the most authentically English writer ever to wholly capture the American comic spirit in his words. ###