Love Among the Chickens

Love Among the Chickens – P. G. Wodehouse – Love Among the Chickens is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published as a book in the United Kingdom in June 1906 by George Newnes, London, and in the United States by Circle Publishing, New York, on 11 May 1909. It had already appeared there as a serial in Circle magazine between September 1908 and March 1909. The English edition was dedicated «to Sir Bargrave and Lady Deane»; the Rt Hon Sir Henry Bargrave Deane QC was a High Court judge and a cousin of Wodehouse's mother.

In 1921, Wodehouse revised the book. In the 1906 version, the first five chapters were narrated in the third person, before shifting to the first person. The new version was narrated entirely in the first person and had a slightly different ending. The new edition was published in May 1921 by Herbert Jenkins and carried an extended dedication to Wodehouse's old school friend, Bill Townend, in which Wodehouse thanked his friend for the original idea for the story and commented that "…I have practically re-written the book. There was some pretty bad work in it…

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.

Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.

In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the US, taking dual British-American citizenship in 1955. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York.