Issue #0

Wodehouse: a Life

Plot

'P. G. Wodehouse is a comic writer of genius best known for Bertie Wooster and his omniscient manservant Jeeves; the pig-loving peer Lord Emsworth - and a regiment of aunts and butlers. But although Wodehouse and his work have become indissolubly part of the English language and literature, the writer himself is enigmatic. His life, notorious for one historic blunder during the Second World War, remains remarkably unexplored.' 'Based on research throughout Britain, Europe and the United States, Wodehouse; A Life goes deep beneath the surface of Wodehouse's extraordinary career, and reveals as never before the complexity of a writer who liked to maintain, against all the evidence, that his life was a 'breeze from start to finish'. In a portrait of a quintessential English writer and his times, Robert McCrum describes Wodehouse's beginnings in Edwardian London, his golden years on Broadway in Jazz Age America, and his adventures in thirties Hollywood. Wodehouse; A Life is a journey through some of the twentieth century's most turbulent decades, and it culminates in Wodehouse's controversial wartime experience; his internment in Nazi Germany and the broadcasts from Berlin, a fateful decision that haunted him to his death in 1975, and still affects his reputation.' Wodehouse; A Life is the story of an Englishman who served to represent the essence of his age and country, but who, tragically, ended his life at odds with both. This biography brings to life the worlds of Wodehouse's century, while never forgetting for a moment his comic genius.