...........and he's a jolly good fellow!

It's the birthday of English novelist Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse, (books by this author) born in Guildford, England (1881). He moved to Greenwich Village in 1909 and began to publish the stories that made him famous in the Saturday Evening Post. From America, he wrote about an imaginary, cartoonish England, full of extremely polite but brain-dead aristocrats, and his work was wildly popular in the years leading up to the decline of the British Empire. He is best known for books such as My Man Jeeves (1919); Carry On, Jeeves (1927);Thank You, Jeeves (1934); and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) — books about a servant named Jeeves who is constantly saving his employer, Bertie Wooster, from all kinds of absurd situations. Over the course of his life, he wrote almost a hundred books of fiction, wrote for 16 plays, and composed lyrics for 28 musicals.