ABSTRACT
“Why America? I have often wondered about that.” So Wodehouse wrote in his memoir Over Seventy (1957), and offered the touching explanation, for whatever it’s worth: “This yearning I had to visit America...was due principally, I think, to the fact that I was an enthusiastic boxer in those days and had a boyish reverence for America’s pugilists—James J. Corbett, James J. Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Kid McCoy and the rest of them.” At any rate “Kid Brady” became an heroic figure in Psmith’s crusade against “raw actual misery” and, con-sequently, we often find ourselves at the ringside of adolescent longing.
