Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

This volume reprints two of Wodehouse’s earliest books which take the form of story sequences linked by a central character, a technique he used many times thereafter. Delightful in themselves, they are interesting chiefly as windows on a great writer’s early evolution.

In The Man of Means, he looks forward to Bertie Wooster and Ukridge, but also back to his Victorian models, in a fantastic tale of the little man struggling with fate. When a humble clerk comes into a fortune, he embarks on a series of misadventures which suggest that wealth is not necessarily an unmixed blessing. Here we see signs of the satirical writer Wodehouse might have become, and the spirit of Chaplin is not far away.

About the series

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century.

His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition.

Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

Evelyn Waugh

About P.G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) is widely regarded as the greatest comic writer of the 20th century. Wodehouse wrote more than 70 novels and 200 short stories, creating numerous much-loved characters - the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his beloved Empress of Blandings, Mr Mulliner, Ukridge, and Psmith. His humorous articles were published in more than 80 magazines, including Punch, over six decades. He was also a highly successful music lyricist, once with over five musicals running on Broadway simultaneously. P.G. Wodehouse was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for 'an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world'.
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