When his cousin Egremont gets betrothed in Hollywood, Reggie Havershot has no choice but to go find him. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.īest 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. 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 prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.Īn acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. I didn't find this one quite as funny as I have some of the Jeeves & Wooster books, but all that means is that I intermittently found myself smiling or chuckling very quietly to myself, rather than suffering embarrassing uncontrollable laughter in public.Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. One day he decides he needs to rise to the challenge of knocking someone's hat off with a slingshot and a brazil nut, and the next thing you know he's started a chain of events that will lead to stunning literary success, blackmail, hijinks involving a very important letter various people are trying to get their hands on, and the overcoming of romantic obstacles for several different couples. Uncle Fred (aka Lord Ickenham), it turns out, is an eccentric and high-spirited fellow. After a few pages, I felt like I already knew Uncle Fred pretty well. I hadn't read the first two, but my experiences with Jeeves & Wooster led me to conclude that Wodehouse novels probably aren't something you really need to read in order, and I wasn't wrong about that. This appears to be book three in Wodehouse's "Uncle Fred" series.
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