The Heart of a Goof is a collection of nine short stories concerning golf by English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in the United Kingdom on April 15, 1926 by Herbert Jenkins, and in the United States on March 4, 1927 by George H. Doran, New York, under the title Divots.
The original story titles and publication dates were as follows:
"The Heart of a Goof"
UK: Strand, April 1924
US: Red Book, September 1923
"High Stakes"
UK: Strand, October 1925
US: Saturday Evening Post, 19 September 1925
"Keeping In with Vosper"
UK: Strand, March 1926
US: Liberty, 13 March 1926
"Chester Forgets Himself"
UK: Strand, May 1924
US: Saturday Evening Post, 7 July 1923
"The Magic Plus Fours"
UK: Strand, December 1922
US: Red Book, January 1923 (as "Plus Fours")
"The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh"
UK: Strand, January 1923
US: Red Book, March 1923 (as "Rollo Podmarsh Comes To")
"Rodney Fails to Qualify"
UK: Strand, March 1924
US: Saturday Evening Post, 23 February 1924
"Jane Gets off the Fairway"
UK: Strand, November 1924
US: Saturday Evening Post, 25 October 1924
"The Purification of Rodney Spelvin"
UK: Strand, September 1925
US: Saturday Evening Post, 22 August 1925
ir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of a pre- and post-World War I English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education and youthful writing career.
An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers such as Stephen Fry, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Adams, J. K. Rowling, and John Le Carré.
Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934), wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg's music for the Gershwin – Romberg musical Rosalie (1928) and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
