A serenely contented writer

Beaming Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, D.Litt. (Oxon), Mark Twain medallist and co-founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club (1881-1975), personified a rare oxymoron: he was a serenely contented writer. Shortly before the Queen awarded him a knighthood and the Queen Mother, a devoted fan, wrote a letter congratulating him, Madame Tussaud’s sent an artist from London to the final Wodehouse home, in Remsenburg, Long Island, to measure him for waxwork portrayal, which, up to that time, he said, was ‘the supreme honour’.

He wrote his first short story at the age of five (the first of more than 300) and at 93 took the half-completed manuscript of his 97th book, a Blandings Castle novel, to his hospital deathbed. In between those achievements, as this delightful, massive collection of his annotated letters shows, Wodehouse was the most prolific humorous writer of the 20th century.

Principally a novelist, he was also a playwright (in his heyday, five of his plays were produced on Broadway simultaneously); a musical comedy librettist and lyricist (he collaborated with Guy Bolton, the Gershwins, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter); a light versifier and a $2,500-a-week screenwriter, all of whose works in all these formats were immensely popular worldwide and held in high esteem by his peers, most notably Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell.