Word: mccrum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...After a stream of popular stories about well-born wastrels, among them Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse introduced a valet named Jeeves. He paired the two to solve plot problems in The Man With Two Left Feet (1917), and the rest is history. To the many theories about the characters' origins, McCrum insightfully adds: "The cunning servant?foolish master has been a staple of comedy since classical times, and Wodehouse certainly knew his Plautus and his Terence." By the 1920s, magazines like Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post would pay up to $35,000 to serialize a Wodehouse novel. At the dawn...