Sunday, May 23, 2004

Wodehouse Addendum

The Russian Wodehouse Society has a bibliography that, among other things, lists the publications where Wodehouse's short stories first appeared. To my surprise, not many of the short stories seem to have made their first U.S. appearance in the Saturday Evening Post (not even the first Mr. Mulliner story, which, as Wodehouse told it, was bought and paid for by his editor at the Saturday Evening Post, George Lorimer). Instead the short stories seem to have mostly appeared in two other magazines: Liberty and Cosmopolitan (no relation to the current one, I'm sure). I'll have to check what kind of stories these magazines published. However, many of Wodehouse's novels were first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and one of his short stories that did appear in the Post, "Honeysuckle Cottage," is a devastating spoof of the kind of gloopy, syrupy romance stories that often appeared in that magazine. So I think it's still fair to say that Wodehouse made a good living, in part, by sending up the contents of the Saturday Evening Post.

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