WODEHOUSE, P.G. Uncle Dynamite.

Written Amidst ‘Constant Interruptions’

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Uncle Dynamite. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited. 1948.

8vo. Publisher’s orange cloth, lettered in black to spine and upper board, illustrated dust-jacket by Frank Ford with printed price 8/6 to front flap; pp. 249, [1 (blank)], [2 (publisher’s advertisements)]; sunning to jacket spine, soiling to whites of jacket, spotting visible to verso, a little spotting to edges of textblock, spotting to endpapers, but otherwise internally clean; very good.

First edition, first printing of the second full-length novel to feature Uncle Fred dragging his nephew Pongo into a tangled web of impersonation, stolen property, and romantic entanglements.

The novel was written in February 1945, when Wodehouse was staying at a private medical clinic in France under police surveillance, having been released from custody while still under suspicion of treason and collaboration. He recalls the difficulty of writing there in a letter to William Towenend: ‘I managed to get a hundred pages done while in the clinic, in spite of constant interruptions. I would start writing and get a paragraph done when the nurse would come in and sluice water all over the floor’ (Wodehouse, p. 140).

The novel was first published in the UK on 22 October 1948, and the US publication followed a month later on 29 November 1948.

Mcllvaine A68a. See Wodehouse, Performing Flea (1961).

SKU: 2126298