(icon; 15 October 188114 February 1975) was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of pre-war
English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.
An acknowledged master of English prose
, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc
, Evelyn Waugh
and Rudyard Kipling
and by modern writers such as Stephen Fry
, Douglas Adams
, Zadie Smith
, J. K. Rowling, and Terry Pratchett
.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'.(quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)
"Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary," murmured Psmith. (No earlier usage of the precise words "Elementary, my dear Watson" has yet been found, even in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.)
"Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it."
The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic.
At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.
‘As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.’
Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.
There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them.
He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect.