Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE (pronounced "Wood-house") 1881-1975] was an English comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success for more than seventy years. An acknowledged master of English prose, contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling (and modern writers including Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Terry Pratchett, and Stephen Fry) show the influence of his work. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea," a derogatory description that Wodehouse cherished and adopted as the title of his autobiography. The Times has hailed him as a 'comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce'.