James Willoughby Pitt
Jimmy Pitt is the hero of A Gentleman of Leisure. Having quit Yale, American Pitt worked as an actor and a waiter, had a job in a jeweller's (where he learnt how to spot fake gems), and even boxed against Kid Brady before taking up journalism. He inherited a fortune from a stranger who loved his mother, and became a playboy. As a result of a bet with his old bohemian friends, he even has a go at burglary, leading to his meeting and falling in love with Molly McEachern. He also befriends Spike Mullins, and makes the crook his valet.
In The Gem Collector, an earlier version of the story, Sir James Willoughby Pitt, Bart, is an Englishman, expelled from Eton, who turns to crime in America, inherits a baronetcy, and later a fortune from his estranged uncle.
Read more about this topic: P. G. Wodehouse Minor Characters
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“Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like—Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything—but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“The little I know of it has not served to raise my opinion of what is vulgarly called the “Monied Interest;” I mean, that blood-sucker, that muckworm, that calls itself “the friend of government.””
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