Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was an English writer and poet born in British India, whose stories, verse and children's books made him one of the most widely read authors of his time. [1] His best-known works include The Jungle Book, Kim, the Just So Stories and the poem "If—". [2] In 1907 he became the first English-language writer, and at forty-one the youngest recipient to date, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. [3]
Early life
Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his father taught at an art school. His early childhood in India, spent largely in the company of Indian servants and speaking Hindustani, supplied material he drew on for the rest of his career. At the age of five he was sent to England and boarded with a foster family in Southsea, an unhappy period he later recounted in the story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep". [1]
He was educated at the United Services College in Devon, a school for the sons of officers, which became the setting for Stalky & Co. Poor eyesight ruled out a military career and there was no money for university, so in 1882 he returned to India to work as a journalist. [2]
India and early success
Kipling worked on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later the Pioneer in Allahabad, writing sketches, verse and short fiction to fill the papers. These were collected as Departmental Ditties (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), which established his reputation for economical storytelling about Anglo-Indian society, soldiers and the Indian scene. [1]
He returned to London in 1889 by way of Burma, Japan and the United States, and was quickly taken up as a literary celebrity. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), written in the voice of the common soldier, and the novel The Light That Failed belong to this period.
Major works
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, an American, and the couple lived for four years in Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and its sequel, the tales of the boy Mowgli raised by wolves that remain his most widely adapted work. [2]
After returning to England he published the Just So Stories (1902), written for his children, and Kim (1901), a novel of an orphaned boy caught up in imperial espionage across India that is generally considered his finest sustained work. He settled at Bateman's, a house in Sussex, in 1902. [1]
Politics, war and later life
Kipling was an outspoken supporter of the British Empire, and poems such as "The White Man's Burden" made him a voice for imperial expansion; the same views have made him one of the most contested figures in English letters. He declined the poet laureateship and a knighthood but accepted the Nobel Prize in 1907. [3]
His son John was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling afterwards worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission, choosing several of the inscriptions still used on Commonwealth war memorials. His later stories turned markedly towards grief, healing and the aftermath of war. He died in London on 18 January 1936 and was buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. [1]
Legacy
Kipling's children's books remain in continuous print and have been adapted for stage and screen many times, while "If—" is repeatedly voted among the best-loved poems in Britain. [2] Critical opinion has long been divided: writers from T. S. Eliot to George Orwell acknowledged his craft while rejecting his politics, and post-colonial scholarship has examined his work as a central document of the imperial imagination.
