When the English writer and humorist P.G. “Plum” Wodehouse died 50 years ago this month, most would be forgiven for believing that his death took place at some grand English country house, not unlike Blandings Castle, or some salubrious Mayfair gentleman’s flat of a kind that Bertie Wooster inhabited. It therefore comes as a surprise, even a faint shock, to discover that Wodehouse died at his home in Southampton, New York, aged 93. And it might provoke a far greater shock to realize he had lived in the United States for nearly 30 years previously. He visited Britain for the final time in the summer of 1939 and never returned there again, because he was terrified of being arrested and imprisoned after some ill-advised broadcasts that he made during World War II, on behalf of the German authorities, went down predictably badly in his home country. To this day, a stigma hangs over his name in Britain because of them.

It was a very different story when the young Wodehouse visited America for the first time in 1904, aged 22. He wrote in his memoirs that “I had always yearned to go there,” seeing it as “a land of romance.” When he arrived in Manhattan on April 25, after a journey in a second-class cabin on the S/S St. Louis, he was not disappointed. He said of New York that “being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the bother and expense of dying.” When he returned to Britain, he was able to parlay his monthlong visit into commercial success, observing that “in 1904, anyone in the London writing world who had been to America was regarded with awe. … My income rose like a rocketing pheasant.”