He’s the one of the best writers of funny books ever, and very popular among readers(which is obviously a rather large qualification, but still) in my country, India. His books are in every bookstore, and on everybody’s bookshelves. But I met a couple of Britishers the other day who’ve never heard of him, which I found a little surprising, considering Wodehouse is British to begin with. Is he no longer popular in Britain? Was he ever popular in America? What about Australia? Do people there ever stop playing sports long enough to read any books at all? 
He’s completely unknown in Israel, except to diehard Fry and Laurie fans.
Of course, comedies of manners don’t really work in a country that doesn’t have any.
Wodehouse moved to the U.S. in the early 1900s, and this is where his career really took off with short story sales to magazines. He was very popular here, but he’s been dead for some time, and I think new readers are hard to find for dead writers.
That said, most libraries I go to have a few of his books kicking around, mostly Jeeves and Blandings, but also bits and pieces of other stuff.
Well, most Indians are every bit as mannerless as they claim Israeli tourists to be, but he does alright here. I don’t think Wodehouse depends on shared experience for his humour. I somehow doubt England was ever really the way he presents it, full of aunts and heirs and women to get into and out of engagements with. It’s his writing that makes it all delightfully funny.
Plum’s still generally known in Britain, apart from a large number of television adaptions ( very few films, oddly enough ) from the '60s on. People don’t seem to read him as much as other authors — but the same applies to his contemporaries, Edgar Wallace and John Galsworthy, who also manage to remain part of the mental furniture of this country — but most people don’t seem to read much anyway, except celebrity biographies etc…
A small tragedy ensued from his fashionable adoption by the chattering classes of conservative bent. People who read the Spectator and Telegraph. Although he was strictly apolitical, from the upper classes, and he wasn’t exactly mocking those classes, it seems odd that they should unctuously laud his ‘funniness’ as if exclusive to them, when he was genuinely for the world.
Rather as if a small unimportant sect of christians thought Christ’s Mission was devoted to themselves alone.
He’s known in the US by the sort of people who are into British things. Not by the general populace as a common thing. If I had to guess at a reason, the US just has a general lack of enthusiasm for effete, elitist things, and PG Wodehouse is about as effete and elitist as it gets.
Of chroniclers of British life, overall James Herriot (“All Creatures Great & Small” memoirs of a country veterinarian) is more well known. But neither is generally well known, ie, you would never hear of either book being assigned in school nor could you ever assume that a particular person has been exposed to either author.
Pakistan, yes, but sadly reducing now. Replaced by Jeffery Archer.
There was a TV series that came out in the UK in the 70s called Wodehouse Playhouse. Then in the early 90s there was Fry and Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster. And just recently in the UK is a stage production that’s been playing, cycling through a whole bunch of great recent-ish British talent as it continues (Stephen Mangan, Matthew MacFadyen, Mark Heap, Robert Webb, James Lance, and John Gordon Sinclair).
I am not in the UK, but it bled over to New Zealand as I grew up, so people of my generation may have heard of him, but anyone younger than 35 or so may not know his name (even if they do know his works).
My Great-Uncle Sandy, WWI veteran, International Brigades veteran, miner and Socialist of the reddest tooth and claw, loved Wodehouse’s stuff. I think my mum still has a lot of Sandy’s books, come to think of it.
The Jeeves and Wooster stuff is a comedy of manners, really, with some slapstick and farce*. The US did manage to produce, over many years and to great critical acclaim, the wonderful Frasier, a show that Wodehouse might have written for, in a different time.
*Edit: and some clumsy satire - the whole Roderick Spode thing
One of these British guys had heard of Jeeves and Wooster the TV series, but not Wodehouse.
I would never have described Wodehouse as elitist.
How is Wodehouse elitist?
Nor, actually, would I ever have described Wodehouse as a chronicler of British life.
George Orwell was also a fan. His essay defending Wodehouse after WWII is worth reading, especially the part where he discusses Wodehouse’s never-very-realistic picture of English society and characterizations which were already old-fashioned after the first war: http://www.drones.com/orwell.html
A lot of Wodehouse’s works are in print in the U.S. He’s not super-popular, but he has a reasonable amount of cult popularity in the U.S. Many people remember the TV adaptations. I think that he’s well known among people who actually read a lot of books, and a reasonable number of them are fans of his works.
In my younger years (through the 1980s and 1990s) he was a writer I’d heard mentioned every once in a great while, but didn’t know much about. As far as I know, his works were never published here in the USA in cheap, mass-market paperbacks, so there wasn’t much chance to read him unless you specifically sought him out in a well-stocked bookstore or library.
Nowadays he seems to be better known, though that may just be my limited perspective—at any rate, I know he gets mentioned fairly frequently here on the SDMB. I suspect this is partly due to the TV series starring Fry and Laurie, and partly due to the availability and popularity of e-books (some of which are in the public domain, and hence free) and audiobooks (in which medium Wodehouse has been well-served).
There are a lot of paperback American editions of Wodehouse. I don’t know if they are “cheap” paperback editions. I don’t know if there is really any useful such distinction. Do a search on any online seller of new or used books to find how many paperback American editions there are of Wodehouse.
It portrays and somewhat celebrates an elite lifestyle which is widely looked down on in the US. Americans are both fascinated and repelled by the “hereditary useless rich”; the main group portrayed in the Jeeves books.
Perhaps I should not have said a “chronicler” but rather that he portrays a certain lifestyle/culture alien to ourselves, but familiar perhaps to the British even if in exaggerated form.
Spain. My father loved him; he gets republished periodically in “humor books” collections - but I’m reasonably sure most people, even those who’ve enjoyed the books, wouldn’t recognize the name. I mean, Dad loved his work and referred to him as “that English writer I like so much, can’t pronounce the name…”