P.G. Wodehouse (15 October &#; 14 February ) was one of the greatest comic writers of the Twentieth Century. He became a master of farce, creating a wonderful array of characters and imaginary fairyland based on the Edwardian British upper class. His books have been translated into countless languages and remain an important part of popular culture.
Early life
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born 15 October , in Guildford, England. His father was a judge in Hong Kong and his family had strong roots in Norfolk often representing the area in Parliament. Wodehouse was sent to boarding school at Dulwich College and he often spent his vacations staying with various aunts around the English countryside. Many of his aunts were married to Church of England vicars. These childhood experiences and people he met would later be incorporated into his novels. At public school, he was an excellent student and sportsman, playing for the football and cricket first teams.
Writing career
P.G. Wodehouse,
Initially, his family planned for him a career in banking in the Far East. However, after his first job for Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, it soon became evident that repetitive paperwork w
P.G. Wodehouse in the OED
Content
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, born in , came of age at the dawn of mass culture. He was an Englishman of that generation, shaped by the Education Act of , for whom the written word was an intoxicating plaything – and a means of self-improvement. Also, as the son of a colonial civil servant he was a junior member of an English establishment shaped by public schools like Dulwich, his alma mater. Wodehouse’s inimitable style, its language and range of allusion, which is also the expression of his comic genius, profoundly reflects these two influences, the popular and the traditional.
College and City: barge, biff, oojah-cum-spiff
As a boy, Wodehouse received a classical education at Dulwich. His instinctive command of the prose sentence, combined with a perfect ear for the music of English, gave him the confidence to trade in school slang (oil; archbish; barge; biff; corking) which would eventually morph into the lingo of his story collection Eggs, Beans and Crumpets.
The Mayfair of the clubs was in the future. Dulwich College is rooted in the suburbs of south London, a genteel purlieu of sorrowful aspirati
On Valentine’s Day 50 years ago, P. G. Wodehouse died, aged The writer of sentences such as ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled’, he has long been admired by other writers.
To Bernard Levin, he was ‘one of the finest and purest writers of English prose’. Rudyard Kipling considered Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend ‘one of the most perfect short stories’. Evelyn Waugh said ‘one has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page’.
(Image credit: Roberto Herrett/Alamy Stock Photo)
The Oxford English Dictionary cites Wodehouse multiple times as the inventor or first recorded user of a phrase or for particular use of a word in a specific sense or with a certain nuance. How many of these were Wodehouse inventions, rather than him picking up on something and being the first known to use it, isn’t clear, but he is suggested as the inventor of such phrases as ‘down to earth’ and ‘pain in the neck’.
‘What Wodehouse writes is pure word music,’ believed Douglas Ad
P.G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced “wood-house”), known as “Plum” to his family and friends, wrote some of the most entertaining novels, stories, plays, lyrics, and poems of the twentieth century, and created enduring characters that millions would like to call their friends. His professional career may well have been the longest of any author; his first story was published in when he was 19 years old, and he continued to write up to and including the day of his death on February 14, , at 93 years of age.
For three-quarters of a century, on both sides of the Atlantic, he worked to craft and polish an inimitable style, with brilliantly-devised farcical plots and a witty use of language that reads as though it had been tossed off without a care. His work has rightly been compared to Mozart's music and Fred Astaire's dancing; seemingly simple and effortless because so much behind-the-scenes work went into its preparation.
Not surprisingly, a famous author like Wodehouse has been the subject of multiple biographies. But in life he was a shy, retiring, mostly reticent fello
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