Biographie de Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in 1881 in Guildford, the son of a civil servant, and educated at Dulwich College. He spent a brief period working for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank before abandoning finance for writing, earning a living by journalism and selling stories to magazines. An enormously popular and prolific writer, he produced about a hundred books. Probably best known for Jeeves, the ever resourceful' gentleman's personal gentleman', and the good-hearted young blunderer Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse created many other comic figures, notably Lord Emsworth, the Hon.
Galahad Threepwood, Psmith and the numerous members of the Drones Club. He was part-author and writer of fifteen straight plays and of a 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. The Times hailed him as a comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce. P. G. Wodehouse said, I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and net caring a damn.
Wodehouse married in 1914 and took American citizenship in 1955.
He was created a Knight of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. In a BBC interview he said that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted and there was a waxwork of him in Madame Tussauds. He died on St Valentine's Day, 1975, at the age of ninety-three.
