Presenting My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse. These classics are part of the P. G. Wodehouse Collection and The Great Books Series by Golding Books, and this book is also available on Amazon in eBook.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1881. His father Henry Ernest Wodehouse was a magistrate resident in the British colony of Hong Kong, and his mother Eleanor (née Deane) was the daughter of the schoolmaster and author Reverend John Bathurst Deane. His mother was visiting her sister when Wodehouse was born prematurely, and after his baptism (and being named after his godfather Lieutenant-Colonel Pelham George von Donop-yet his nickname came to be "Plum") the two sailed for Hong Kong. Raised by a Chinese nurse along with his elder brothers Peveril and Armine, the siblings returned to England when Wodehouse was two and were cared for by an English nanny in a house adjoining that of Eleanor's parents' (a then-normal arrangement for colony families). Whatever the effect of the distance, Wodehouse developed a love for reading and dreaming up stories and described his childhood as a happy one. He attended Malvern House Preparatory School in Kent, as his father planned for him to have a career in the Royal Navy, but poor eyesight prevented him from pursuing this (he later parodied Malvern House's austerity by having character Bertie Wooster describe his school as a "penitentiary"). In 1894 he followed brother Armine to Dulwich College, and liked the camaraderie there, becoming editor of the school magazine, The Alleynian, and excelling in various sports as well as singing. His father's pension lost value (it fell against the pound, since it was paid in rupees), and, rather than follow Armine to Oxford, Wodehouse was unhappily employed in a junior position at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in London. He would write at the end of each working day, and during his two years at the bank he had 80 pieces published in nine magazines, also writing for The Globe newspaper's popular "By the Way" column. With the publishing of his first novel The Pothunters (1902), Wodehouse resigned from the bank to write full-time. Amongst his considerable literary output, his most enduring and beloved characters include the witty monocle-sporting Psmith, idle rich Londoner Bertie Wooster and his highly capable valet Jeeves, the amiable if forgetful Threepwood family head Lord Emsworth and his idyllic home of Blandings Castle, Mr. Mulliner and his improbable recollections in the Angler's Rest pub, and the Oldest Member and his unabating golf stories. It is also notable that, having moved to France in 1934 for tax reasons, in 1940 Wodehouse was taken prisoner at Le Touquet in northern France by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. On his release, six broadcasts (comic rather than political) from German radio in Berlin to the United States led to anger in Britain, and he never returned to England. From 1947 he lived instead in the US, taking dual British-American citizenship in 1955. Over the course of his long career, Wodehouse wrote more than 70 novels, 40 plays (including books for musicals), and 20 collections of short stories, as well as assorted articles, autobiographical stories, and poetry. He died in 1975, aged 93, in Southampton, New York.
