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HITS |
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P G Wodehouse |
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A Damsel in Distress |
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A full cast of Wodehouse creations--including tyrannical relatives, beastly acquaintances, demon children, and literary fatheads--return for further near catastrophes and sparkling comedy Overlook is proud to present four more antic selections from comic genius, P.G. Wodehouse. A Damsel in Distress is an early novel about Belpher Castle, the idyllic home of the aristocratic Marshmoreton family and a precursor to the Blandings series. |
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Leave it to Psmith is a comedy adventure involving crime and gunplay, all set into motion by an umbrella in the Drones Club and Mulliner Nights is a series of stories about the inimitable Mr. Mulliner, his extraordinary relations, and the tipsy bishops, angry baronets, lady novelists, and haughty dowagers who frequent the bar-parlor of the Angler's Rest. Meanwhile, Lord ‘Chuffy' Chuffnell borrows the services of Jeeves in Thank You, Jeeves, while pursuing the love of his life, but when he finds out that Jeeves's employer, Bertie Wooster, was once engaged to Pauline himself, fearsome complications develop. |
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Indiscretions Of Archie |
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The jeweller, a stout, comfortable man, leaned on the counter and fingered lovingly the bracelet which he had lifted out of its nest of blue plush. Archie, leaning on the other side of the counter, inspected the bracelet searchingly, wishing that he knew more about these things; for he had rather a sort of idea that the merchant was scheming to do him in the eyeball. |
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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, as the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British judge in Hong Kong, and Eleanor (Deane) Wodehouse. Within the family, Wodehouse's first name was abbreviated to "Plum" and later also his wife and friends used this name. Until the age of four, Wodehouse lived in Hong Kong with his parents. Returning to England, he spent much of his childhood in the care of various aunts, seeing rarely his parents. Wodehouse attended boarding schools and received his secondary education at Dulwich College, London, which he always remembered with affection. "To me, the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven," he once said. His first story Wodehouse wrote at the age of seven. His first article for which he was paid was 'Some Aspects of Game Captaincy". Wodehouse wrote it for a competition sponsored by The Public School Magazine. However, Wodehouse's father did not approve of his son's writing, and after graduating in 1900 Wodehouse worked two years at the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Wodehouse entered the literary world first as a free-lance writer, contributing humorous stories to Punch and the London Globe, where he had a column called 'By the Way'. Most of his stories appeared first serialized at the Saturday Evening Post. After 1909 he lived and worked long periods in the United States and in France. In 1914 he married Ethel Newton, a widow; they had met in New York eight weeks earlier. She had a daughter, Leonora, whom Wodehouse adopted legally. In 1926 he dedicated THE HEART OF A GOOF to his daughter "without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half time." Leonora died in 1943. Wodehouse wrote for musical comedy in New York and for Hollywood, but viewed the film industry ironically. "In every studio in Hollywood there are rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a walk. And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be very callous not to be touched by such a spectacle as this." (Wodehouse in Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1929) Once he spent a week at William Randolph Hearst's estate and wrote: "I sat on [Hearst's mistress Marion Davies's] right the first night, the found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end . . . Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor." Wodehouse's early stories were mainly for schoolboys centering on a character known as Ronald (or sometimes Rupert) Eustace Psmith, a "very tall, very thin, very solemn young man". Following the World War I Wodehouse gained fame with the novel PICCADILLY JIM (1918). At the time he married Ethel, he had only $100 in bank, but by the 1920s he was earning $100,000 in a year. His major breakthrough Wodehause made with the THE INIMITABLE JEEVES (1924). He had introduced Bertie Woorster and a valet named Jeeves in the short story 'The Man with Two Left Feet' (1917). THANK YOU, JEEVES (1934), his novel centering on these characters, was immediately greeted as one of his very best. Although the juxtaposition of a clever servant and foolish master had been known since classical times and was famously used by Cervantes in the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza pair, Wodehouse managed to refresh the old idea and add to it a peculiar British twist. Usually Jeeves saved Bertie from many disasters. Of his relatives the most formidable was Aunt Agatha. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in his Jeeves, A Gentleman's Personal Gentleman (1979): "Bertie was under the impression that he had chosen Jeeves, approving the man who had been sent by an agency. But that is not what happened. Proust once remarked that, 'It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.'" In addition to his humorous novels and stories, Wodehouse collaborated with Guy Bolton in writing several popular Broadway musicals, notably SALLY (1920), SITTING PRETTY (1924), ANYTHING GOES (1934), and BRING ON THE GIRLS (1954). Wodehouse's greatest lyrics include 'Bill', a hit in the musical Show Boat. "Musical comedy was my dish," he once said. He collaborated among others with Jerome Kern (Oh, Boy!, 1917; Leave it to Jane, 1917), George Gershwin (Oh, Kay!, 1926), and Cole Porter, who wrote lyrics and music for Anything Goes. "So always look for the silver lining Wodehouse spent the remainder of his life in several homes in the U.S. and Europe. During World War II Wodehouse was captured by the Germans at Le Touquet, France, where he used to stay when not living in England-partly because tax authorities. At that time the U.S. had not entered the war. After spending about a year in various German camps, he was interned in Berlin, and naïvely recorded five interviews, depicting humorously his experiences as an internee. These interviews were broadcast by German radio to America and England, but his made Wodehouse liable to charges of treason. Wodehouse was labelled as a quisling in the Daily Mirror and libraries withdrew his books-the Battle of Britain was no laughing matter. After the liberation of Paris, Wodehouse was arrested by the French, and released in 1945 through the intervention of British officials. For fear of prosecution, which the British officials had actually dropped, he was not able to return to his home country. Wodehouse settled in the United States, living in his new home country in near-seclusion. He bought a ten-acre estate on Long Island in 1952. An American citizen he became three years later. By this time his political mistakes were forgotten, and Wodehouse was subsequently awarded a D.Litt. from Oxford University. He died in Remsenburg, Long Island, on February 14, 1975. Wodehouse had received a knighthood a few weeks before he died. Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 novels, about 30 plays and 20 screenplays. His first book, THE POTHUNTERS, a short story collection, was published 1902. The last, AUNT'S AREN'T GENTLEMEN, appeared 1974. Wodehouse also wrote his memoirs, PERFORMING FLEA (1951) and OVER SEVENTY (1957). In the 1960s Wodehouse's stories inspired the television series The World of Wooster and Blandings Castle. Wodehouse Playhouse started in 1975 and in the 1990s Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves appeared in new television series. Piccadilly Jim was made into a film by Robert Z. Leonard in 1936, starring Robert Montgomery, Madge Evans, and Frank Morgan |
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