Headline Feb08, 2013

'''As Brilliant As -''Einstein-Bach-Mozart''

- WRITER : P.G.WODEHOUSE

He was two years younger than Einstein, Trotsky and EM Forester, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were born a year later. So he was a part of the generation that challenged every aspect of the world around them: music, language, perspective and even time itself.

Wodehouse was never a revolutionary, though he did get into hot water. He was a white, Protestant Englishman of good family who published approximately 100 books and who wrote everyday of his long life. He was 93 when he died on a Valentine's day in 1975.

He wrote lyrics, stories, novels, plays, films,letters, libretti, and journalism. Wodehouse was a man obsessed with English at play  In his prime, he not only forged a universally recognised English style, he also gave us an immortal cast of characters, from Ukridge and Aunt Agatha to Lord Emsworth and Roderick Spode, to say nothing of Jeeves and Wooster.

But that's not wholly why he has so many admirers. In his prime, he was a wildly popular writer who transformed comic prose into a kind of poetry, and who gave England an infectiously lunatic version of itself. It was this that made him famous throughout the English speaking world. especially the US.

This also makes him terribly modern. From early in his career, he sold his work in New York as well as London. By 1914, he had perfected the art of selling a literary interpretation of the US to British readers, and an affectionate caricature of the Britain to US audiences, refracting his experience through the rosy filters of his imagination, a talented emulated decades later by the makers of the film: Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Some of the inspiration for Wodehouse's best literary farces came from his work in the theater, on Broadway and  in the West End. Readers of his novel Thank You. Jeeves, will find the experience of the first 100 pages a pure pure delight. The readers might also be intrigued that Wodehouse first wrote many of those opening pages at warp speed in a matter of 10 days.

P.G. Wodehouse;s best writing is timeless and surprisingly modern. He will always remain a much loved English genius who offers us that priceless gift perhaps more vital today than ever  -of cheering us up!!

With respectful dedication to all budding ''Student Writers'' of the world.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless