Wodehouse: A Life

by RobertMcCrum (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $29.30

  To Evelyn Waugh he was simply the Master. He wrote ninety novels and story collections, and among his immortal characters are Jeeves, Psmith, and the Empress of Blandings (who is, of course, a pig). Equally impressive is the range of his devotees: Dorothy Parker, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salman Rushdie, John le Carre, and Seamus Heaney. Wodehouse had an extraordinary Broadway career, working with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and even dared to rewrite Cole Porter's Anything Goes for the London stage. Robert McCrum's magisterial biography chronicles the achievements and shadows of a gilded life. The ill-judged broadcasts from Berlin, where Wodehouse was interned during World War II, produced a violent backlash in England and tarred him, unfairly, as a Nazi sympathizer. His long love affair with America was compromised by endless acrimony with the IRS. This is the book all Wodehouse fans have been waiting for; it eclipses all previous accounts of his life. An Economist Best Book of 2004.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $5.58

  One hundred years after his first novel was published P.G. Wodehouse still promises a release from everyday cares into a paradise of innocent comic mayhem. His many books are still in print, his characters Jeeves, Wooster and Lord Emsworth have passed into the language and his admirers range from Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Waugh to Salman Rushdie, Stephen Fry and Gerry Adams.In a new biography based on research throughout Britain, Europe and the USA Robert McCrum delves deep beneath the brilliant surface of P.G. Wodehouse's extraordinary life: his youth in Edwardian Britain, his golden years in Jazz Age America and his internment in Nazi Germany, the experience that haunted him to his death in 1975, to create a moving and extremely funny portrait of an English writer of genius.