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 one hundred books, and was probably best known for creating Jeeves, the ever resourceful 'gentleman's personal gentleman', and the good-hearted young blunderer Bertie Wooster. However, Wodehouse created many other comic figures, perhaps most notably the inhabitants of, and regular visitors to, Blandings Castle and its environs. He wrote the many Blandings stories over the course of more than sixty years; the first, Something Fresh, appeared in 1915, while at the time of his death he was working on the posthumously published Sunset at Blandings. He was part-author and writer of fifteen straight plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical 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.