PG Wodehouse secures redemption as British Library acquires priceless archive

The author’s reputation, long tarnished by charges of Nazi collaboration, will be restored as his papers find a new home

For most of his 93 years, PG Wodehouse, the “performing flea” of English literature, was also an elephant of productivity. Up to his final hours, he wrote every day, accumulating a manuscript mountain: letters to friends, writers and composers, from Evelyn Waugh to George Gershwin, light verse, journals and journalism, libretti, short stories, plays and novels such as Right Ho, Jeeves, and The Code of the Woosters. At the peak of his career in the 1930s, he complained to a friend: “I have become a writing machine.”

Now the Observer can reveal that this lifetime of literary work has reached a remarkable climax. On Thursday, the British Library will announce that the Wodehouse archive is about to join its 20th-century holdings, a collection that includes the papers of Arthur Conan Doyle, Evelyn Waugh, Mervyn Peake, Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Beryl Bainbridge, JG Ballard and Angela Carter.

Related: Devoted American pilgrims move Jeeves, Bertie Wooster and Blandings Castle to Seattle

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