P. G. Wodehouse

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P. G. Wodehouse bigraphy, stories - British comic writer

P. G. Wodehouse : biography

15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE ( 15 October 188114 February 1975) was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years, and his many writings continue to be widely read. 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 a pre- and post-World War I 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 recent writers such as Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, J. K. Rowling, and John Le Carré.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934), wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern’s Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg’s music for the Gershwin – Romberg musical Rosalie (1928) and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Wodehouse spent the last decades of his life in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1955, because of controversy that arose when he made some humorous broadcasts for the Germans during World War II, while he was under house arrest in France. The broadcasts led to accusations of collaboration and even treason, and some libraries banned his books. An investigation later cleared him of any wartime crimes. He never returned to England.

Biography

Early life

Wodehouse, called "Plum" (abbreviating "Pelham") by most family and friends, was born prematurely to Eleanor Wodehouse (née Deane; daughter of John Bathurst Deane) while she was visiting Guildford. He was baptised at St. Nicolas’ Church, Guildford.. His aunt Mary Deane was the author of the novel Mr. Zinzan of Bath; or, Seen in an Old Mirror. His father, Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845–1929), was a British judge in Hong Kong. The Wodehouse family had been settled in Norfolk for many centuries. Wodehouse’s great-grandfather Reverend Philip Wodehouse was the second son of Sir Armine Wodehouse, 5th Baronet, whose eldest son John Wodehouse, 1st Baron Wodehouse, was the ancestor of the Earls of Kimberley. His godfather was Pelham von Donop, after whom he was named.

When he was just three years old, Wodehouse was brought back to Britain and placed in the care of a nanny. He attended various boarding schools and, between the ages of three and 15 years, saw his parents for barely six months in total. Wodehouse grew very close to his brother, who shared his love for art. Wodehouse filled the voids in his life by writing relentlessly. He spent quite a few of his school holidays with one aunt or another; it has been speculated that this gave him a healthy horror of the "gaggle of aunts", reflected in Bertie Wooster’s formidable aunts Agatha and Dahlia, as well as Lady Constance Keeble’s tyranny over her many nieces and nephews in the Blandings Castle series.

Wodehouse’s first school was the Chalet School, Croydon, which he attended between 1886 and 1889, together with his two older brothers — Richard, the youngest of the four Wodehouse brothers, was much younger and became somewhat noteworthy as a cricketer in Asia. In 1889, the eldest brother, Peveril, was diagnosed as having a weak chest and the three brothers were sent to Elizabeth College, Guernsey (where they appear on the census for 1891), where Peveril could benefit from the sea air. Wodehouse remained at Elizabeth College for two years, until, at age 10, it became time for him to move to a preparatory school. Wodehouse’s first prep school was Malvern House, at Kearsney, near Dover, Kent, which specialised in preparing boys for entry to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Wodehouse spent two unhappy years at Malvern House before finally persuading his father to send him to Dulwich College, where his elder brother Armine was already a pupil.