A full cast of Wodehouse creations—including tyrannical relatives, beastly acquaintances, demon children, and literary fatheads—return for further near catastrophes and sparkling comedy. A Gentleman of Leisure is a comic novel dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks—who starred in the film version—and concerns a young man, his love life, and a burglary. Familiar Wodehouse characters from both sides of the ocean make appearances. Meanwhile, in Hot Water, J. Wellington Gedge is the man who has everything—but finds himself caught in a series of international events which will, if he doesn't put a stop to it, leave him wearing the sissy uniform of the American ambassador to Paris. Summer Moonshine involves Sir Buckstone Abbott trying to sell what is probably the ugliest home in England, as well as a complicated love quadrangle and Carry On, Jeeves is a collection of stories in which Jeeves take charge and a familiar bevy of individuals appeal to him to solve their problems—and are never disappointed.
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
