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A Wodehouse Bestiary: Vintage Animal Tales from the World-Renowned Humorist Kindle Edition
Fans already familiar with Wodehouse the Connoisseur of Country Houses or Wodehouse the Golfing Enthusiast have a real and unexpected treat in store for them in this remarkable anthology, which highlights a previously overlooked Wodehouse—the Keen Animal Observer, a Wodehouse worthy of a special place of honor. Since the collection contains some of his very best stories, it will also serve as a delightful introduction to his complete oeuvre as well as to his natural history.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1999
- File size1201 KB
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From Library Journal
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in 1881 in Guildford, the son of a civil servant, and educated at Dulwich College. He spent a brief period working for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank before abandoning finance for writing, earning a living by journalism and selling stories to magazines.
An enormously popular and prolific writer, he produced about 100 books. In Jeeves, the ever resourceful "gentleman's personal gentleman", and the good-hearted young blunderer Bertie Wooster, he created two of the best known and best loved characters in twentieth century literature. Their exploits, first collected in Carry On, Jeeves, were chronicled in fourteen books, and have been repeatedly adapted for television, radio and the stage. Wodehouse also created many other comic figures, notably Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, Psmith and the numerous members of the Drones Club. He was part-author and writer of fifteen straight plays and 250 lyrics for some 30 msical comedies. The Times hailed him as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce."
P. G. Wodehouse said, "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn ...."
Wodehouse married in 1914 and took American citizenship in 1955. He was created a Knight of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. In a BBC interview he said that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted and there was a waxwork of him in Madame Tussaud's. He died on St. Valentine's Day, 1975, at the age of ninety-three.
Product details
- ASIN : B0085TKBL6
- Publisher : Mariner Books (September 1, 1999)
- Publication date : September 1, 1999
- Language : English
- File size : 1201 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 326 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #97,072 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #21 in Classic Humor Fiction
- #94 in British & Irish Humor & Satire
- #121 in Humorous Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (/ˈwʊdhaʊs/; 15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Born in Guildford, the son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years. They include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; the feeble-minded Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the loquacious Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and the equally loquacious Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Although most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in England, he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. During and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, he wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies that were an important part of the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naïve revelations of incompetence and extravagance at Hollywood studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.
In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the US, taking dual British-American citizenship in 1955. He was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York.
Wodehouse worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career he would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared with comic poetry and musical comedy. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Unlisted photographer for Screenland (Screenland, August 1930 (Vol XXI, No 4); p. 20) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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That big-hearted generosity wouldn't necessarily translate into good animal stories, but in Wodehouse it does. This collection is called a Bestiary (Beastiary) after the Medieaval collections of animal fables, and is collected from various volumes of Wodehousiana, including Very Good Jeeves, Mulliner Nights, Blandings Castle, Jeeves, Young Men in Spats, and The Man With Two Left Feet. However, these various stories have been collected in numerous volumes with alternate titles (see the lists in Joseph Connolly's P.G. Wodehouse or Richard Usborne's Plum Sauce or the biography by Donaldson).
All of which makes this the perfect place to meet the Master, as numerous other writers have called him. The animal stories are among his absolute best, and they also serve as an introduction to the Jeeves and Wooster adventures, the Drones Club stories, the Blandings Castle saga, Mr. Mulliner tales and the many one-offs, all being reprinted in hardback by Overlook Press and in paperback by Penguin for new readers who will naturally want to pursue more.
Although I first read this exact edition, the one I have now is different, although I believe the contents are the same. Mine reads: Unpleasantness at Budleigh Court; Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch; Something Squishy; Pig Hooo-o-o-o-ey!; Comrade Bingo; Monkey Business (not the Marilyn Monroe movie); Jeeves and the Impending Doom; Open House; Ukridge's Dog College; The Story of Webster; The Go-Getter; Jeeves and the Old School Chum; Uncle Fred Flits By; and The Mixer.
Stories will feature Blandings castle with the Empress of Blandings, Bertie Wooster being bested, (Beasted?) by cats and dogs. The back cover tells us that P.G. was an owner of many Pekingese dogs and so there are at least 9 listed in the volume. There is a gorilla in a literally starring role and a swan who is not to be treated lightly. There are a few stories where if you do not pay close attention, you may miss the animal.
These being Wodehouse stories it is almost impossible to have a Spoiler. Readers can usually guess outcomes by the second page. The pleasure is always the nearly effortless prose that manages to select just the right word to gives us the facts, but startles us by the humorous aptness of the expression. A lovely book to fill odd moments with making fun of golfers, game hunters and the frivolously mannered.