Wodehouse in the House

Ever since reading Anthony Lane's essay on P.G. Wodehouse in the New Yorker a while back, I've been on a tremendous Wodehouse kick, whenever I can spare the time from my professional book reviewing duties and the stuff I read to keep this blog au courant. I think he's just swell--and still influential--so it's a treat to see Bookseller.com interview Robert McCrum about a Wodehouse biography Viking will publish in the U.K. this fall.

"He's a great stylist and a great English humorist: I think he's a minor genius," McCrum says. "He wrote about 100 books and they are all in print--what other 20th-century writer can you say that about? Almost none. Auden, Joyce, Eliot--he's in very good company. I think any canon from Shakespeare onwards that includes Austen and Dickens must include him."