Mike

Mike Jackson is the youngest son of a family of excellent cricket players and the most promising batsman of them all. At Wrykyn, the public school his elder brothers once attended, his desire to prove himself as a cricketer is challenged by his apathy for studying and his penchant for mischief. In the second half of the novel, his poor academics result in his being sent to Sedleigh, where he immediately befriends Psmith, an eccentric monocle-wearing student in a similar situation. Together they navigate the social waters of a school that neither one of them wants to attend. Mike was one of P. G. Wodehouse's earlier novels, and one of his personal favorites. In a preface to a later edition, he stated that the school setting allowed Psmith's "bland clashings with Authority" to truly shine. The cricket scenes are memorable and exciting, but the meat of the story is in Mike and Psmith's school escapades. Mike was originally published in The Captain magazine in two parts, Jackson Junior (published in 1953 as Mike at Wrykyn), and The Lost Lambs (also published later as Enter Psmith in 1935 and Mike and Psmith in 1953). A rollicking tale of cricket, camaraderie, and running afoul of schoolmasters, featuring the very first appearance of the inimitable Psmith. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)