Duke of Wooster-shire

To millions of readers in scores of languages around the world, the name P.G. Wodehouse evokes a mirthful Edwardian realm of hapless dukes, fearsome maiden aunts and one very tolerant, quietly competent valet. Wodehouse, who died in 1975 at the age of 93, remains one of the best-loved English writers. Nearly all of his 100-odd novels and story collections are still in print. Wodehouse magazines and fan clubs dot the globe. Hardly a decade passes without a new movie or play inspired by his creations: the dim but affable Bertie Wooster, his long-suffering gentleman's gentleman Jeeves and their screwball cohorts at Blandings Castle and the Drones Club.

So rich is Wodehouse's legacy that it is difficult to understand why he almost destroyed it. As Robert McCrum recounts in his exhaustive, elegantly written Wodehouse: A Life (Viking; 530 pages), the author was at the peak of his popularity when, in 1941, he made a series of wartime broadcasts for the Nazis while interned in Germany. He was not coerced, but he clearly misjudged the seriousness of his action. In Britain, politicians denounced him in Parliament and columnists in print. Libraries withdrew his books. The British government investigated him for treason, and editors wouldn't touch his writings with a cricket bat. The man whose vision of Britain is now engraved in the popular mind could not go home again. Concludes McCrum, literary editor of Britain's The Observer: "The Second World War finished Wodehouse."

Not quite. He found a new home and, eventually, even greater fame after the war. As McCrum also notes, Wodehouse was every inch the Edwardian: calm in a crisis, aloof but generous (he supported an old school chum for years), quietly productive (he could pound out a novel's first draft in days), and fit as an oak (thanks to daily calisthenics). Many of those qualities can be traced to Wodehouse's Woosterish upbringing. A descendant of Norfolk nobility, including a sister of Henry VIII's ill-fated wife Ann Boleyn, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse rarely saw his parents — a colonial administrator and his dour wife. The young "Plum," as Pelham was nicknamed, was raised by nannies and schoolmasters to become an athletic but bookishly solitary child, reading the Iliad at age 6 and penning his first story at 7. When his parents refused to fund him at Oxford, he joined a London bank, writing at night and resigning as soon as he could support himself as a freelancer.