P. G. Wodehouse was an English novelist, short-story writer, and humorist best known for Jeeves and Bertie Wooster and the inhabitants of Blandings Castle. His fiction turns engagements, family expectations, misplaced objects, and elaborate misunderstandings into carefully arranged comic adventures. A distinctive mixture of conversational ease, surprising comparisons, and verbal precision gives his stories their enduring charm.

Educated at Dulwich College, Wodehouse briefly worked in banking before establishing himself as a professional writer. Early school stories gave way to the comic worlds for which he became famous. He also contributed lyrics and scripts to musical theater, working on Broadway with collaborators including Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton, and spent much of his adult life in the United States.

His apparently effortless plots were the result of detailed preparation, and his prose draws freely on slang, literature, and the rhythms of speech. His wartime broadcasts from Germany, made after internment, provoked lasting controversy in Britain. He later settled permanently in America and continued writing into old age. His literary reputation rests on a remarkably sustained ability to create comic complications and bring them to satisfying resolution.