A Man of Means

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (October 15, 1881 - February 14, 1975) was an English comic writer who has enjoyed enormous popular success for more than seventy years. Wodehouse was an acknowledged master of English prose, admired both by contemporaries like Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers like Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse said he believed was "meant to be complimentary", and which he used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend, which was published in 1953. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Show Boat.