Sir P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the twentieth century: the man who gave the language Bertie Wooster and his omniscient valet Jeeves, the immaculate Psmith, Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set, the golf-fixated Oldest Member and the tall-tale-telling Mr. Mulliner. Born in Guildford and devoted for life to his schooldays at Dulwich College, he escaped an uncongenial bank job through writing, graduated from school stories to comic fiction, and co-wrote Broadway musicals with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern that played a genuine part in shaping the American musical.
The life was not all sunlit farce. Captured in France in 1940 and interned for nearly a year, he then made five comic, apolitical broadcasts on German radio to the still-neutral United States – a catastrophic misjudgement that provoked fury in Britain, talk of prosecution and a permanent departure: he never returned to England. He lived in the United States from 1947, and received his knighthood one month before his death in 1975, aged 93, with more than ninety books to his name.
40 hours and 37 minutes
