UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · FICTION · HUMOROUS
P. G. Wodehouse
Also known as: P.G. Wodehouse, P.G Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) (pronounced /ˈwʊdhaʊs/) 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 of 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 pre-war 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 modern writers such as Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Terry Pratchett. Journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens commented, "there is not, and never will be, anything to touch him." Wodehouse's characters are often eccentric, with peculiar attachments, such as to pigs (Lord Emsworth), newts (Gussie Fink-Nottle), antique silver (Bertie's Uncle Tom Travers), golf-collectables (numerous characters) or socks (Archibald Mulliner). His "mentally negligible" good-natured characters invariably make their lot worse by their half-witted schemes to improve a bad situation. A key figure in most Wodehouse stories is a "fixer" whose genius soars above the incompetent blather and crude bluster of most of the other characters, Jeeves being the best known example. Other characters in this vein are Lord Ickenham ("Uncle Fred") and Galahad Threepwood, who perform much the same role in the Blandings Castle stories—though never both at the same time—and Psmith, who does the same thing in the stories that bear his name. Wodehouse was known for his consummate skill at their detailed construction and development. Typically, a relative or friend makes some demand that forces a character into a bizarre situation from which it seems impossible to recover, only to resolve itself in a clever and satisfying finale. Source: Wikipedia
Sir James Piper, England's Chancellor of the Exchequer, sat in his London study staring before him with what are usually called unseeing eyes and snorting every now and then like somebody bursting a series of small paper bags.
— from Sunset At Blandings
Most acclaimed
Joy in the Morning
1946
A timeless classic! From Betty Smith - author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, one of the most beloved novels of the past century - comes an unsentimental yet radiant and powerfully uplifting tale of young hearts and marriage. In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone halfway across the country to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law - and there they marry. But their first year together is much more difficult than they anticipated, in a faraway place with little money and few friends. With hardship and poverty weighing heavily upon them, Annie and Carl come to realize that their greatest sources of strength, loyalty and love, will help them make it through. "A more dauntless heroine or a more appealing one has not turned up in a current novel in years" - New York Times
Sunset At Blandings
The Wodehouse collection comes to an end with a sparkling classic from the master of hijinks and social comedy. This is Wodehouse's last, unfinished chronicle of Blandings and includes a treasure trove of detailed notes on the final stages of the plot, enabling us to watch over his shoulder to observe the master at work. The revels at Blandings Castle are now ended but, as Richard Usborne confirms delightedly, its cloud-capped towers shall not dissolve. Although written when Wodehouse was ninety-three, the pages of "Sunset At Blandings" remain 'funny, fresh, young in heart and full of hammocks, sunshine and four pairs of lovers headed for altars.
The golf omnibus
1973
Amongst the many memorable characters P. G. Wodehouse has created is The Oldest Member, who, full of reverence for the sacred game of golf. tells some of the most hilarious stories about it In all its literature. Not that the narrator regarded golf as a suitable subject for levity—far from it. Seated on the terrace of a variety of clubhouses, this venerable sage, who has not himself played golf since the rubber-cored ball superseded the old dignified gutty. hears the confidences of the members, young and old, listens to their problems, watches over their love affairs, and philosophises on all aspects of the great game—never failing to point a moral with recollectlons out-rivalling those of the late Baron Munchausen. These stories. all thirty-one of them. are now collected together for the first time In one volume To those to whom golf is an ambition. an obsession, or a way of life. this book is a gloriously funny must. It will not less enchant those without the pale as an irresistible example of the Wodehouse genius.