Wodehouse – A Life - Softcover

Mccrum, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327515 ISBN 13: 9780393327519

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

To Evelyn Waugh he was simply "the Master." He wrote ninety novels and story collections, and among his immortal characters are Jeeves, Psmith, and the Empress of Blandings (who is, of course, a pig). Equally impressive is the range of his devotees: Dorothy Parker, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salman Rushdie, John le Carre, and Seamus Heaney. Wodehouse had an extraordinary Broadway career, working with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and even dared to rewrite Cole Porter's Anything Goes for the London stage. Robert McCrum's magisterial biography chronicles the achievements and shadows of a gilded life. The ill-judged broadcasts from Berlin, where Wodehouse was interned during World War II, produced a violent backlash in England and tarred him, unfairly, as a Nazi sympathizer. His long love affair with America was compromised by endless acrimony with the IRS. This is the book all Wodehouse fans have been waiting for; it eclipses all previous accounts of his life. An Economist Best Book of 2004.

About this title

Review:

McCrum . . . has written a biography that, if the subject were a general or a politician, would be dubbed 'magisterial.' This is a magisterial biography: disinterested, but never detached, and always intriguing. Under the kindly and scholarly tutelage of McCrum, you might want to explore here the Wodehouse genius, the inconsistencies and downright silliness in the man's life.--Frank McCourt

[An] absorbing and generous biography, which now takes its rightful place as 'the life.'--Christopher Buckley

This book is a triumph. Not only should all P. G. Wodehouse fans read it, but it is a masterly picture of twentieth-century history.--A. N. Wilson

About the Author:

Robert McCrum is the associate editor of The Observer and lives in London with his wife, Sarah Lyall. His books include the bestselling The Story of English, My Year Off, Wodehouse: A Life, and Globish.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393327515
• ISBN 13: 9780393327519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384