the biography of rudyard kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was an English author famous for an array of works like 'Just So Stories,' 'If' and 'The Jungle Book.' He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature.

(1865-1936)

Who Was Rudyard Kipling?

Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865 and educated in England but returned to India in 1882. A decade later, Kipling married Caroline Balestier and settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), among a host of other works that made him hugely successful. Kipling was the recipient of the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1936.

Early Years

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay (now called Mumbai), India. At the time of his birth, his parents, John and Alice, were recent arrivals in India as part of the British Empire. The family lived well, and Kipling was especially close to his mother. His father, an artist, was the head of the Department of Architectural Sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay.

For Kipling, India was a wondrous place. Along with his younger sister, Alice, he reveled in exploring the local markets with his nanny. He learned the language and, in this bustling city of Anglos, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews, connected with the country and its culture.

However, at the age of six, Kipling's life was torn apart when his mother, wanting her son to receive a formal British education, sent him to Southsea, England, where he attended school and lived with a foster family named the Holloways.

These were hard years for Kipling. Mrs. Holloway was a brutal woman who quickly grew to despise her foster son. She beat and bullied the youngster, who also struggled to fit in at school. His only break from the Holloways came in December, when Kipling, who told nobody of his problems at school or with his foster parents, traveled to London to stay with relatives for the month.

Kipling's solace came in books and stories. With few friends, he devoted himself to reading. He particularly adored the work of Daniel Defoe , Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wilkie Collins. When Mrs. Holloway took away his books, Kipling snuck in literature time, pretending to play in his room by moving furniture along the floor while he read.

By the age of 11, Kipling was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A visitor to his home saw his condition and immediately contacted his mother, who rushed back to England and rescued her son from the Holloways. To help relax his mind, Alice took her son on an extended vacation and then placed him in a new school in Devon. There, Kipling flourished and discovered his talent for writing, eventually becoming editor of the school newspaper.

The Young Writer

In 1882, Kipling returned to India. It was a powerful time in the young writer's life. The sights and sounds, even the language, which he'd believed he'd forgotten, rushed back to him upon his arrival.

Kipling made his home with his parents in Lahore and, with his father's help, found a job with a local newspaper. The job offered Kipling a good excuse to discover his surroundings. Nighttime, especially, proved to be valuable for the young writer. Kipling was a man of two worlds, somebody who was accepted by both his British counterparts and the native population. Suffering from insomnia, he roamed the city streets and gained access to the brothels and opium dens that rarely opened their doors to common Englishmen.

Kipling's experiences during this time formed the backbone for a series of stories he began to write and publish. They were eventually assembled into a collection of 40 short stories called Plain Tales From the Hills , which gained wide popularity in England.

In 1889, seven years after he had left England, Kipling returned to its shores in hopes of leveraging the modest amount of celebrity his book of short stories had earned him. In London, he met Wolcott Balestier, an American agent and publisher who quickly became one of Kipling's great friends and supporters. The two men grew close and even traveled together to the United States, where Balestier introduced his fellow writer to his childhood home of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Life in America

Around this time, Kipling's star power started to grow. In addition to Plain Tales From the Hills , Kipling published a second collection of short stories, Wee Willie Winkie (1888), and American Notes (1891), which chronicled his early impressions of America. In 1892, he also published the poetry work Barrack-Room Ballads .

Kipling's friendship with Balestier changed the young writer's life. He soon got to know Balestier's family, in particular, his sister, Carrie. The two appeared to be just friends, but during the Christmas holiday in 1891, Kipling, who had traveled back to India to see his family, received an urgent cable from Carrie. Wolcott had died suddenly of typhoid fever and Carrie needed Kipling to be with her.

Kipling rushed back to England, and within eight days of his return, the two married at a small ceremony attended by American writer Henry James.

Fame With 'Jungle Book' and 'Naulahka'

Following their wedding, the Kiplings set off on an adventurous honeymoon that took them to Canada and then Japan. But as was often the case in Kipling's life, good fortune was accompanied by hard luck. During the Japanese leg of the journey, Kipling learned that his bank, the New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. The Kiplings were broke.

Left only with what they had with them, the young couple decided to travel to Brattleboro, where much of Carrie's family still resided. Kipling fell in love with life in the states, and the two decided to settle there. In the spring of 1891, the Kiplings purchased from Carrie's brother Beatty a piece of land just north of Brattleboro and had a large home constructed, which they called the Naulahka.

Kipling seemed to adore his new life, which soon saw the Kiplings welcome their first child, a daughter named Josephine (born in 1893), and a second daughter, Elsie (born in 1896). A third child, John, was born in 1897, after the Kiplings had left America.

As a writer, too, Kipling flourished. His work during this time included The Jungle Book (1894), The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (1892) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), among others. Kipling was delighted to be around children—a characteristic that was apparent in his writing. His tales enchanted girls and boys all over the English-speaking world.

But life again took another dramatic turn for the family when Kipling had a major falling out with Beatty. The two men quarreled, and when Kipling made noise about taking his brother-in-law to court because of threats Beatty had made to his life, newspapers across America broadcast the spat on their front pages.

The gentle Kipling was embarrassed by the attention and regretful of how his celebrity had worked against him. As a result, in 1896, he and his family left Vermont for a new life back in England.

Family Tragedy

In the winter of 1899, Carrie, who was homesick, decided that the family needed to travel back to New York to see her mother. But the journey across the Atlantic was brutal, and New York was frigid. Both Kipling and young Josephine arrived in the states gravely ill with pneumonia. For days, the world kept careful watch on the state of Kipling's health as newspapers reported on his condition.

Kipling did recover, but his beloved Josephine did not. The family waited until Kipling was strong enough to hear the news, but even then, Carrie could not bear to break it to him, asking his publisher, Frank Doubleday, to do so instead. To those who knew him, it was clear that Kipling never recovered from Josephine's death. He vowed never to return to America.

Over time, Kipling would become known for harboring a sense of English imperialism and views on certain cultures that would draw much objection and be seen as disturbingly racist. Yet even as Kipling grew more rigid in his viewpoints as he got older, aspects of his earlier work would still be celebrated.

Life in England

The turn of the century saw the publication of another novel that would become quite popular, Kim (1901), which featured a youth's adventure on the Grand Trunk Road. In 1902, the Kiplings bought a large estate in Sussex known as Bateman's. The property had been erected in 1634, and for the private Kiplings, it offered the kind of isolation they now cherished. Kipling revered the new home, with its lush gardens and classic details. "Behold us," he wrote in a November 1902 letter, "lawful owners of a grey stone, lichened house—A.D. 1634 over the door—beamed, paneled, with old oak staircase and all untouched and unfaked."

At Bateman's, Kipling found some of the happiness he thought he had forever lost following the death of Josephine. He was dedicated as ever to his writing, something Carrie helped ensure. Adopting the role of the head of the household, she held reporters at bay when they came calling and issued directions to both staff and children.

Kipling's books during his years at Bateman's included Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debts and Credits (1926), Thy Servant a Dog (1930) and Limits and Renewals (1932).

The same year he purchased Bateman's, Kipling also published his Just So Stories , which were greeted with wide acclaim. The book itself was in part a tribute to his late daughter, for whom Kipling had originally crafted the stories as he put her to bed. The book's name had, in fact, come from Josephine, who told her father he had to repeat each tale as he always had, or "just so," as Josephine often said.

World War I

As much of Europe braced for war with Germany, Kipling proved to be an ardent supporter of the fight. In 1915, he even traveled to France to report on the war from the trenches. He also encouraged his son, John, to enlist. Since Josephine's death, Kipling and John had grown tremendously close.

Wanting to help his son enlist, Kipling drove John to several different military recruiters. But plagued with the same eyesight problems his father had, John was repeatedly turned down. Finally, Kipling made use of his connections and managed to get John enlisted with the Irish Guard as a second lieutenant.

In October 1915, the Kiplings received word that John had gone missing in France. The news devastated the couple. Kipling, perhaps feeling guilty about his push to make his son a soldier, set off for France to find John. But nothing ever came of the search, and John's body was never recovered. A distraught and drained Kipling returned to England to once again mourn the loss of a child.

Final Years and Death

While Kipling continued to write for the next two decades, he never again returned to the bright, cheery children's tales he had once so delighted in crafting. Health issues eventually caught up to both Kipling and Carrie, the result of age and grief.

Over his last few years, Kipling suffered from a painful ulcer that eventually took his life on January 18, 1936. Kipling's ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner next to the graves of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens .

Disney Adaptations

Kipling's work entered the realm of mass popular entertainment in the Disney film adaptation of The Jungle Book , a 1967 animated musical loosely based on the original tale. A live-action/CGI version of the movie was later released in 2016, with direction by Jon Favreau and the vocal talents of Idris Elba , Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o and Scarlett Johansson .

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Rudyard Kipling
• Birth Year: 1865
• Birth date: December 30, 1865
• Birth City: Bombay
• Birth Country: India
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Rudyard Kipling was an English author famous for an array of works like 'Just So Stories,' 'If' and 'The Jungle Book.' He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• Death Year: 1936
• Death date: January 18, 1936
• Death City: Middlesex Hospital, London
• Death Country: England

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Rudyard Kipling Biography: Life, Achievements, and Legacy

{ Read his poems }

Rudyard Kipling, born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, was an English author, poet, and journalist whose extensive body of work has made him one of the most influential literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His vivid storytelling and unforgettable characters brought to life the culture and spirit of the British Empire and the Indian subcontinent, earning him a dedicated and widespread readership.

Kipling’s work spans various literary genres, including short stories, novels, and poetry, which have been celebrated for their exceptional narrative quality, captivating characters, and profound exploration of human nature. With classics like The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just So Stories, Kipling introduced readers to rich, fantastical worlds while also addressing the complex social and political issues of his time.

His writings continue to inspire and provoke discussions on subjects such as colonialism, race, and the human experience, while also influencing countless authors and artists that followed him. As a testament to his literary prowess, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, further solidifying his position as a towering figure in the realm of English literature.

Table of Contents

Early Life and Influences

Birth and family background.

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, to John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald Kipling. His father, an artist and educator, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay. His mother, Alice, was a vivacious woman with a strong social circle, which included many influential figures of the time. Rudyard was named after the picturesque Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England, where his parents had met and courted.

Education and formative experiences

United services college.

At the age of six, Kipling was sent to England to receive a British education, as was customary for children of British colonial officials. He attended the United Services College in Westward Ho!, Devon, a boarding school that primarily prepared boys for military service. It was here that Kipling experienced the harsh realities of British boarding school life, which he later chronicled in his semi-autobiographical novel, Stalky & Co. (1899). Kipling’s time at the United Services College helped shape his outlook on life and instilled in him a deep appreciation for discipline, order, and loyalty.

Influence of India on his work

Kipling’s childhood years in India had a lasting impact on his writing, as he was captivated by the country’s vibrant culture, folklore, and diverse landscape. The sights, sounds, and experiences of his early years in Bombay permeated his work, providing rich and authentic details that set his stories apart. Kipling’s deep connection to India would later serve as the backdrop for some of his most acclaimed works, including The Jungle Book, Kim, and many of his short stories.

Apprenticeship as a journalist

Work at the civil and military gazette.

At the age of 16, Kipling returned to India to work as a journalist at the Civil and Military Gazette, an English-language newspaper in Lahore (now in Pakistan). During his time there, he honed his writing skills and developed a keen eye for observing and capturing the subtleties of human nature. He also began publishing his poetry and short stories in the newspaper, marking the beginning of his literary career.

Work at The Pioneer

In 1887, Kipling moved to Allahabad to work for The Pioneer, another prominent English-language newspaper in India. This new position allowed him to further develop his journalistic and literary skills, while also offering him the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the Indian subcontinent. These experiences further enriched his writing, as he gained invaluable insights into the lives, customs, and struggles of the diverse people who inhabited the region.

Literary Career

Early writings and poetry, departmental ditties (1886).

Kipling’s first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886. It contained satirical poems that humorously depicted the bureaucracy and daily life of British colonial administration in India. The poems showcased Kipling’s wit and keen observational skills, highlighting the foibles and eccentricities of the characters he encountered during his journalistic career.

Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

In 1888, Kipling published his first collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills. The stories, initially published in the Civil and Military Gazette, offered a unique glimpse into the lives of British colonial officers, their families, and the local Indian population. Kipling’s vivid descriptions and engaging storytelling made the collection an instant success, both in India and England.

The Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

In 1892, Kipling released The Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of poems that captured the experiences of British soldiers in India. Among the most famous of these poems is “Gunga Din,” which tells the story of an Indian water-bearer who bravely saves a British soldier’s life despite facing discrimination and ill-treatment.

Danny Deever

Another notable poem from The Barrack-Room Ballads is “Danny Deever,” which recounts the execution of a British soldier for murdering a fellow comrade. The poem’s somber tone and vivid imagery struck a chord with readers and further demonstrated Kipling’s versatility as a writer.

The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895)

Mowgli’s story.

Kipling’s most famous work, The Jungle Book, was published in 1894, followed by The Second Jungle Book in 1895. The books consist of a series of short stories, with the most well-known centering on Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. Mowgli’s adventures and encounters with various animals, including the wise panther Bagheera and the villainous tiger Shere Khan, have captivated readers for generations.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Another beloved story from The Jungle Book is “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” which tells the tale of a courageous mongoose who protects a human family from two deadly cobras. The story is a testament to Kipling’s ability to create memorable characters and weave engaging tales that transcend time and culture.

Captains Courageous (1897)

Captains Courageous, published in 1897, is a coming-of-age novel that follows the journey of Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled American boy who is transformed through his experiences working on a fishing schooner. The novel showcases Kipling’s talent for capturing the human spirit and the challenges faced by individuals in unique circumstances.

Kim, published in 1901, is Kipling’s most acclaimed novel. Set in colonial India, it tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, a young orphan who becomes embroiled in the “Great Game” of espionage and political intrigue between the British and Russian Empires. The novel is a rich exploration of the complexities of identity, loyalty, and friendship, as well as a vivid portrayal of the Indian subcontinent’s diverse culture and landscape.

Just So Stories (1902)

In 1902, Kipling published the Just So Stories, a collection of imaginative and humorous tales for children that explain how various animals acquired their unique features, such as “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “The Elephant’s Child.”

Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910)

Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906, is a collection of short stories and poems centered around the adventures of two English children, Dan and Una, who encounter Puck, a mischievous and wise fairy from ancient English folklore. This collection of short stories introduces the children to a series of historical figures, transporting them through various eras of English history. The stories are woven together with Kipling’s deep love for his country and its rich heritage. Rewards and Fairies, the sequel published in 1910, continues the adventures of Dan and Una with Puck as their guide, providing further insights into England’s history and mythology.

Later writings and poetry

A diversity of creatures (1917).

A Diversity of Creatures, published in 1917, is a collection of short stories and poems that reflect Kipling’s diverse literary interests and talents. The collection includes tales that delve into the human condition, explore the natural world, and touch upon the social and political issues of the time. Some of the notable stories in this collection include “Mary Postgate,” a chilling tale of revenge, and “The Eye of Allah,” which explores the consequences of the discovery of a powerful scientific invention.

Debits and Credits (1926)

Debits and Credits, published in 1926, is another collection of short stories and poems that showcase Kipling’s versatility as a writer. This collection touches on a wide range of themes, from the complexities of human relationships to the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in wartime. The poignant tale “The Gardener,” for instance, tells the story of a woman’s quest to find her nephew’s grave after World War I. These later works by Kipling further demonstrate his ability to captivate readers with his storytelling and to delve deeply into the human experience.

Personal Life

Marriage to caroline balestier.

In 1892, Kipling married Caroline “Carrie” Balestier, the sister of his American publisher and collaborator Wolcott Balestier. Their union was marked by a deep mutual affection and understanding, with Carrie providing the emotional and practical support that Kipling needed to navigate the demands of his literary career. Together, they had three children: Josephine, Elsie, and John.

Life in the United States

Naulakha, their vermont home.

Shortly after their marriage, Kipling and Carrie moved to the United States, where they built a home called “Naulakha” in Dummerston, Vermont. This period in Kipling’s life was marked by both personal happiness and professional success, as he penned some of his most enduring works, including The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous, while enjoying the serenity and beauty of the Vermont countryside.

Relationship with American culture and people

Kipling’s time in the United States allowed him to develop an appreciation for American culture and its people, whom he found to be warm, friendly, and open-hearted. His experiences in America influenced his writing, as he incorporated American themes and characters into his works, such as the protagonist of Captains Courageous. However, Kipling’s relationship with America was not without its challenges, as he faced criticism for his views on imperialism and international politics.

Return to England

Bateman’s, their sussex home.

In 1896, after a legal dispute with Carrie’s brother, the Kiplings decided to return to England. They settled in a 17th-century house called Bateman’s in Burwash, East Sussex, where Kipling found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. Bateman’s would remain their home for the rest of Kipling’s life, serving as a sanctuary where he could write and reflect on the world around him.

Kipling’s later years and friendships

Kipling’s later years were marked by both personal tragedy and professional triumph. He faced the heartbreaking loss of his daughter Josephine to pneumonia in 1899 and his son John in World War I in 1915. Despite these challenges, Kipling continued to write and maintain friendships with notable figures of his time, including fellow authors H.G. Wells and Henry James. As Kipling aged, his literary output slowed, but he remained a respected and influential figure in the world of English literature until his death in 1936.

Literary Achievements and Honors

Nobel prize in literature (1907).

In 1907, Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive this prestigious honor. The Swedish Academy lauded Kipling for his extraordinary narrative gifts and his ability to capture the essence of the human experience in a powerful and vivid manner. The Nobel Prize not only recognized Kipling’s exceptional body of work but also cemented his place as one of the most important literary figures of his time.

Influence on contemporary writers

Kipling’s innovative storytelling, unique characters, and masterful use of language have left an indelible mark on the world of literature. He has influenced countless authors, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who have drawn inspiration from his vivid descriptions, moral themes, and compelling narratives. Kipling’s work has also been adapted for film, television, and stage, further attesting to the enduring appeal and relevance of his stories.

Criticisms and controversies

Accusations of racism and imperialism.

Despite his significant literary achievements, Kipling’s work has not been without controversy. Critics have accused him of promoting racism and imperialism, particularly in his portrayal of non-European cultures and his endorsement of British colonial rule. Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s Burden” has been widely criticized for its paternalistic and condescending tone towards colonized peoples.

Kipling’s response to critics

Kipling was not oblivious to the criticisms of his work and the controversy surrounding his views on race and imperialism. In some instances, he defended his position, arguing that he genuinely believed in the civilizing mission of the British Empire. In other cases, Kipling acknowledged the complexities and contradictions inherent in colonial rule, as evidenced by the nuanced portrayal of characters and situations in works like Kim. While Kipling’s views on race and imperialism remain a subject of debate, his literary contributions and their impact on generations of readers and writers cannot be denied.

Enduring Legacy

Adaptations of kipling’s work, film and television adaptations.

The enduring appeal of Rudyard Kipling’s stories is evident in the numerous film and television adaptations of his work. Among the most famous adaptations are the multiple versions of The Jungle Book, which have captivated audiences worldwide with their engaging characters and memorable songs. Additionally, other works like Kim, Captains Courageous, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi have been brought to life on screen, introducing Kipling’s stories to new generations of viewers and solidifying his status as a beloved storyteller.

Influence on popular culture

Kipling’s work has also made a significant impact on popular culture, with phrases from his poems and stories becoming part of the common lexicon. For example, the expression “the law of the jungle” is derived from The Jungle Book, while “East is East, and West is West” comes from his poem “The Ballad of East and West.” Kipling’s characters, stories, and themes continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, demonstrating his enduring influence on our collective imagination.

Continued impact on literature

Themes and motifs in kipling’s work.

Kipling’s work is characterized by its exploration of themes such as the complexities of human nature, the struggle for survival, and the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in challenging situations. His stories often feature characters who must navigate the tensions between tradition and modernity, loyalty and betrayal, and duty and desire. These timeless themes continue to inspire and engage readers, while also providing a rich source of study for scholars and critics.

Kipling’s place in the literary canon

Despite the controversies surrounding some aspects of his work, Rudyard Kipling’s place in the literary canon remains secure. His unique storytelling style, evocative descriptions, and memorable characters have made him a towering figure in the world of English literature. Kipling’s work has been analyzed, interpreted, and celebrated for generations, and his influence on subsequent writers is undeniable. As a result, his stories and poems continue to be read, studied, and cherished, ensuring that his literary legacy will endure for years to come.

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• Rudyard Kipling - Facts

Rudyard Kipling

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Rudyard Kipling The Nobel Prize in Literature 1907

Born: 30 December 1865, Bombay, British India (now Mumbai, India)

Died: 18 January 1936, London, United Kingdom

Residence at the time of the award: United Kingdom

Prize motivation: “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author”

Language: English

Prize share: 1/1

Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai and lived with relatives in England between the ages of 6 and 17, when he returned to India. As a child he spoke English, Hindi and Portuguese. This is evident in his writing, which revolves around issues of language and identity. After returning to India, Kipling traveled around the country as a correspondent. Contemporary Great Britain appreciated him for his depictions of life, religions, traditions and nature in what was then the British colony of India.

As a poet, short story writer, journalist and novelist, Rudyard Kipling described the British colonial empire in positive terms, which made his poetry popular in the British Army. The Jungle Book (1894) has made him known and loved by children throughout the world, especially thanks to Disney’s 1967 film adaptation. The Swedish Academy pointed out that Kipling’s special strengths were his personal portraits and descriptions of social settings that “penetrate to the essence of things” rather than just reproducing the transitory.

Nobel Prizes and laureates

Nobel prizes 2023.

Explore prizes and laureates

The Kipling Society

Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936

… Baa Baa Black Sheep … In Ambush … The City of Dreadful Night … My Boy Jack … Something of Myself …

Young Rudyard’s earliest years in Bombay were blissfully happy, in an India full of exotic sights and sounds. But at the age of five he was sent back to England with his sister to stay with a foster family in Southsea, where he was desperately unhappy. The experience would colour some of his later writing.

Stalky & Co. , based on those schooldays, has been much relished by generations of schoolboys. Despite poor eyesight which handicapped him on the games field, he began to blossom.

In 1882, aged sixteen, he returned to Lahore, where his parents now lived, to work on the Civil and Military Gazette , and later on its sister paper the Pioneer in Allahabad.

In his limited spare time he wrote many remarkable poems and stories which were published alongside his reporting. When these were collected and published as books, they formed the basis of his early fame.

After a world trip, he returned with Carrie to her family home in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, with the aim of settling down there. It was in Brattleboro, deep in New England, that he wrote Captains Courageous and The Jungle Books , and where their first two children, Josephine and Elsie, were born.

A quarrel with Rudyard’s brother-in-law drove the Kiplings back to England in 1896, and the following year they moved to Rottingdean in Sussex, the county which he adopted as his own. Their son John was born in North End House, the holiday home of Rudyard’s aunt, Georgiana Burne-Jones, and soon they moved into The Elms.

Life was content and fulfilling until, tragically, Josephine died while the family were on a visit to the United States in early 1899.

By now Kipling had come to be regarded as the People’s Laureate and the poet of Empire, and he produced some of his most memorable poems and stories in Rottingdean, including Kim, Stalky & Co., and Just So Stories.

At the Museum of the Rottingdean Preservation Society, at The Grange in Rottingdean, there is a now a Kipling Room, with a reconstruction of his study in The Elms, and exhibits devoted to his work. The Grange is open daily, and there is no admission charge.

Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies , which included the poem “If-“ , and other well-known volumes of stories, were written there, and express Kipling’s deep sense of the ancient continuity of place and people in the English countryside.

There is a wealth of information about Burwash here.

Bateman’s is now in the care of the National Trust and is visited by thousands of people every year.  From the beginning of their time there, Carrie kept a record of every visitor who stayed with them.

Kipling visited South Africa during the war, visiting hospitals and hospital trains, and writing tales and poems about the conflict. He was appalled by the lack of preparedness and professionalism of the  British army. He was a friend of of Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, and of Dr Jameson, leader of the Jameson Raid, on whose qualities the poem “If–“ is said to have been based. He knew Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, from Indian days, and wrote at Roberts’s request for the Army’s newspaper in Bloemfontein, rediscovering the familiar routines of journalism. Thereafter he spent many winters after in a house near Capetown, at the invitation of Rhodes. (See our notes on “A Burgher of the Free State”.

See Hugh Brogan’s article on “The Great War and Rudyard Kiplling”.

Rudyard Kipling’s reputation grew from phenomenal early critical success to international celebrity, then faded for a time as his conservative views were held by some to be old-fashioned. The balance has been somewhat restored, and many readers in the 21st century continue to appreciate his mastery of expression in poetry and prose, and the sheer range of his work. His role as the bard of empire remains an issue of debate. (see our pages on  “ Kipling and Empire” .)”  

His memoir Something of Myself was written in 1935, the last year of his life and published posthumously.

Over the years a number of writers have  written accounts of Kipling’s life and work, as can be seen from the Biography section of our booklist.    For an excellent critical assessment of the biographies, written in 2008, see the article by Lisa Lewis on “ Kipling’s Biographers”.

[M.S./J.R.]

Rudyard Kipling: Biography

The story of Rudyard Kipling is a tale of paradise lost. It is the story of a literary genius who wrote some of the world's best known and enduring books yet whose own life was filled with tragedy.

Kipling was a literary giant of the twentieth century, a man whose remarkable range of work captivated not just a nation but an empire. He was the nations laureate, the voice of the people and he became an international superstar.

His work continues to fascinate and enchant. ‘The Jungle Book’ and the famous poem, ‘If’, remain as popular today as they were when published one hundred years ago.

Less well-known is the private life of the man who produced such masterpieces. Kipling endured an appalling childhood, a domineering wife, and the devastating loss of two of his children.

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Rudyard Kipling summary

Rudyard Kipling , (born Dec. 30, 1865, Bombay, India—died Jan. 18, 1936, London, Eng.), Indian-born British novelist, short-story writer, and poet. The son of a museum curator, he was reared in England but returned to India as a journalist. He soon became famous for volumes of stories, beginning with Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; including “The Man Who Would Be King”), and later for the poetry collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892; including “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay”). His poems, often strongly rhythmic, are frequently narrative ballads. During a residence in the U.S., he published a novel, The Light That Failed (1890); the two Jungle Book s (1894, 1895), stories of the wild boy Mowgli in the Indian jungle that have become children’s classics; the adventure story Captains Courageous (1897); and Kim (1901), one of the great novels of India. He wrote six other volumes of short stories and several other verse collections. His children’s books include the famous Just So Stories (1902) and the fairy-tale collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His extraordinary popularity in his own time declined as his reputation suffered after World War I because of his widespread image as a jingoistic imperialist.

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48 Biography: Rudyard Kipling

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling

Artist | Unknown  Source | Wikimedia Commons License | Public Domain

RUDYARD KIPLING

(1865-1936)

Born in India where his father taught architecture in Bombay (now Mumbai), Rudyard Kipling always viewed his childhood there as idyllic. In contrast, he always viewed his introduction (even indoctrination) to “superior” British society—by being boarded out for six years to a sea captain living in Southsea—as desolating. Seemingly abandoned by his parents, Kipling was left to the less than tender care of the captain’s widow. He found consolation, however, in the company of his uncle, Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), the Pre-Raphaelite painter and friend of William Morris. His artistic tastes and knowledge were honed by the readings, games, and story-telling he enjoyed with Burne-Jones’s family.

Equally agreeable was his studying at the United Services College, whose headmaster Cormell Price was a friend of both Burne-Jones and Morris and whose radical precepts fostered Kipling’s interest in poetry. Not expected to qualify for a scholarship at Oxford, Kipling was provided a position—through his parents’ connections—as reporter for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, where his father then worked as a museum curator.

His reporting gave him insights to Anglo-Indian society, British colonial administration, British military life, and Indian culture. His extraordinary creativity

and energy led to his regularly publishing stories in the Gazette that he published in volume form as Soldiers Three (1888). While depicting rugged “masculinity” and adventures, these stories also revealed general human failings and vices that occurred across races. Promoted to a senior paper, The Pioneer, Kipling’s exposes and commentaries evoked considerable backlash and complaint, to the point that Kipling returned to England, where he soon won a place in English letters with his The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories (1890), The Light That Failed (1891), and Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892).

In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Balestier, his agent’s sister. Her family connections in Vermont led the couple to settle in Dummerston, Vermont where they had Naulakha built, a home somewhat reminiscent of an Indian bungalow. There Kipling wrote The Jungle Book (1894), Captains Courageous (1897), and The Day’s Work (1898). Family disputes caused the couple to return to England in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. His writing then gave sometimes nuanced, sometimes jingoistic voice to the last hurrah of British Imperialism, including Cecil Rhodes’s (1853—1902) extremely problematic—and ultimately unsuccessful—empire-building in South Africa. Like so many others in England, the Kiplings suffered loss in WWI with the death of their son John. Kipling’s subsequent activities in the first decades of the twentieth century focused on emotional recovery from the war.

Kipling’s diverse literary output—poetry, short stories, essays, novels, and autobiography—may on the whole reveal the worse of British racial bias, Western prejudice, and political conservatism. Yet they also reveal his concern with the individual within the larger social system, even when he over-relied on such systems. “The Man Who Would Be King” recounts the “might-makes-right” power-grabbing of two adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan who intrepidly go away to be kings. They exploit so-called native superstition that views these two men as gods. And they call attention to the apparent whiteness of the Kafirs they dominate as a positive. Yet their story references the Masonic brotherhood, a group that Kipling upheld as ideally (if not actually) a brotherhood of all humankind— “prince” or “beggar” regardless of race. And Carnahan undergoes Christ-like punishment and penance. The crown (and head) he carries at the end of the book disappears, as though it’s a passing on of the baton.

This material is from  British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond  by Bonnie J. Robinson from the University System of Georgia, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This license allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as you credit this original source for the creation and license the new creation under identical terms.

British Literature Copyright © by Elizabeth Harlan. All Rights Reserved.

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Poet Biographies

Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Legacy

Rudyard Kipling was an English author and poet who gained popularity for his vivid imagery and masterful storytelling. He became one of the most widely-read writers in the English-speaking world.

Rudyard Kipling was an incredibly popular writer during his lifetime and for the years following his death. He was known as a poet, story writer, and novelist. But, his reputation has suffered over recent decades due to readers’ perception of him as a thoughtless imperialist. Today, although some of  Rudyard Kipling’s poems  and stories are contentious, many readers still enjoy his most famous works, such as  ‘ Gunga Din ,’ ‘ Mandalay ,’  and  The Jungle Book. 

The prodigiously gifted writer was a man of many talents and had a broad literary repertoire. He left a legacy of rich, complex, and technically well-executed work, creating stories and poems for both the young and old.

About Rudyard Kipling

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Early Works
• 6 Literary Career
• 7 Literary Successes and Personal Tragedies
• 8 Later Life and Death
• 9 Influence from Other Writers
• Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in December 1865.
• In 1886, Kipling published his first collection titled “ Departmental Ditties .”
• In the early 1900s, the Kiplings bought an estate in Sussex known as Bateman’s.
• Kipling’s son John died in France in 1915.
• He developed an ulcer that eventually led him to take his own life in January 1936.

Interesting Facts

• ‘ Wee Willie Winkie ‘ and ‘ American Notes ‘ were published in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
• Kipling’s best-known book is ‘ The Jungle Book .’
• After marrying, Kipling and his wife traveled to Canada and Japan.
• Over the last two decades of his life, he stopped writing literature for children and suffered from health issues.
• His ashes are interred at Westminster Abbey in Poet’s Corner.

Famous Poems

• ‘ The Gods of Copybook Headings ‘ discusses, through the metaphor of a copybook, the malevolent nature of progress and humanity’s eventual return to the basic principles of a good life. Kipling depicts the copybook headings as proven moral points. These are beliefs that humanity returns to again and again. Even when people drift away from the copybook headings, they’re still close to one’s minds. The headings reassert themselves, and the cycle begins again.
• ‘ Gunga Din ‘ is told from the perceptive of an English soldier in India. The soldier describes Gunga Din, a water carrier who saves the soldier’s life in battle. Despite his hard work and kindness, Gunga Din is treated terribly by the Englishmen he serves with. He dies after saving the speaker ’s life. The soldier concludes that Gunga Din was a far better man than he was.
• ‘ If ‘   is, without a doubt, Kipling’s most famous poem. It is filled with advice from a   father to his son about how to live his life. The “then” portion complements the “If” portion of the poem. A solution follows every scenario. If a reader does, as the speaker has suggested, he declares that they will be set to conquer the world and become a “Man.”
• ‘ The Glory of the Garden ‘ is about English gardens and the need to create a perfect space. The poem extolls hard work over laziness and expands the “garden” to include all of England. Throughout, the poet makes sure to emphasize all the hard work that goes into it. This is seen through the “tool-and-potting sheds” and “barrows and the planks.”
• ‘ The Ballad of East and West’ speaks about the life of an Afghan warrior and raider, Kamal. In particular, a series of events in which he takes a horse from an English colonel. The complex story includes various perspectives as the Colonel’s son seeks out Kamal. Kamal tries to reason with the son, telling him that he should not risk his life over a horse. Eventually, the horse returns to the owner of its own accord, and the Colonel’s son gives Kamal a pistol.

Explore more of Rudyard Kipling’s poems here.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in December 1865. His parents were Alice Macdonald and John Lockwood Kipling. His father worked as an artist and Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.

The couple had moved to India in 1865 after marrying in Staffordshire, England. As a child, Kipling was close to his mother and his younger sister, Alice. The siblings would spend time exploring the markets of Bombay and were exposed to various cultures and ways of life. When he was six years old, he was sent to England to receive a proper education. He lived with a foster family in a boarding house in Southsea. The matriarch, a widow of an old Navy captain, was a brutal and cruel woman. She was unkind to the young boy and often beat him.

After enduring the punishing time in Southsea, Kipling went on the attend the United Services College in Westward Ho, Bideford.

During this difficult period of his life, he found temporary relief in the books he came into contact with. These included the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson  and Wilkie Collins. At eleven years old, due to his living conditions, he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His mother was informed, and she removed him from the household and placed him in a school in Devon. It was there that he first discovered his writing talent. He would eventually find work with the school newspaper.

It was in 1882 that Kipling returned to India. He was deeply moved by this change in his circumstances and made his home in Lahore. Kipling worked for a local newspaper while spending his free time exploring the city. In 1886, Kipling published his first collection titled  Departmental Ditties  and began contributing  short stories  to the  Civil and Military Gazette.

In 1892, Kipling got married to Caroline Balestier, who was the sister of Wolcott Balestier. Wolcott was an established American publisher, a connection that undoubtedly helped Kipling during his career. Wolcott and Rudyard were within the same literary circles and had even come together to collaborate in 1892 with the work  The Naulahka.

Early Works

Throughout the later months of 1886 and the early months of 1887, around thirty-nine stories appeared in the newspaper. A number of these were compiled in  Plain Tales from the Hills  in 1888. It was his first  prose  collection and was published when he was 22. Over the next year, he journeyed back to England with the hopes of working off the successes of his previous publications.

Literary Career

His next collections,  Wee Willie Winkie  and  American Notes,  were published in the late 1880s and early 1890s. These volumes were inspired by the time he spent in America alongside Wolcott Balestier. It was in 1891 that Kipling grew close with Balestier’s sister, Carrie. The two married soon after Balestier’s death from typhoid fever.

After marrying, Kipling and his wife traveled to Canada and Japan. It was during these years that Kipling lost his entire fortune due to the failure of his bank. The young couple moved to Brattleboro and settled down in a small, economical cottage. It was here that they had their first child, Josephine. She was followed by Elsie and, later, John, born in 1897 after the couple moved to Devon.

Rudyard Kipling became the first Englishman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, arguably one of the greatest accolades a poet can achieve.

Literary Successes and Personal Tragedies

It was also around this time period that Kipling published his best-known work, The Jungle Book. This novel , along with its sequel, was produced alongside several volumes of poetry and another collection of short stories in a four-year period. The works, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book , were extremely popular with children, which deeply pleased Kipling.

In 1899, after a disastrous journey back to the United States for a visit with Carrie’s parents, their daughter Josephine died of pneumonia. Kipling had contracted the illness and was spared from the news of her death until he had recovered. He was never the same again.

In the following years, Kipling published the popular novel Kim, and the Kiplings could buy an estate in Sussex known as Bateman’s. In the same year, the Kiplings purchased the estate where Rudyard published Just So Stories, another work received well by the public.

Later Life and Death

Rudyard Kipling grew into a role as a journalist, becoming an active war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War. After some great success, he was called up to become the ‘Honorary Literary Advisor’ for the Imperial War Graves Commission. In the early years of the first world war, Kipling traveled to France to report on activity from the trenches. He also helped his son John in his quest to enlist in the army. He had been turned down several times due to problems with his eyesight. John Kipling eventually became a member of the Irish Guard and went missing in October 1915. Kipling searched for his son in France but never recovered his body.

The death of a second child proved to be the beginning of a darker period of time for Kipling. Over the last two decades of his life, he stopped writing literature for children and suffered from health issues. He had developed an ulcer, which eventually caused him to take his own life in January 1936. He had died at his home in Burwash, East Sussex, where he had spent the rest of his life since 1902. Kipling’s works of inarguable greatness propelled him to the heights of literary fame, and he was recognized upon his death for his contributions. His ashes were buried at Westminster Abbey, London, in Poet’s Corner, alongside all-time great poets such as; Geoffrey Chaucer , William Shakespeare , and Ted Hughes .

There has been some controversy surrounding Kipling’s life and his political and social views leading up to and after his death. It is believed that some of Rudyard Kiplin’s poems were imperialist in nature, supporting and even encouraging colonialism. His poem ‘ The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Phillippine Islands ‘ is said to be the most glaring example of his positive outlook on nations spreading their power throughout the world. In this particular poem, he is suggesting that the United States should follow in the footsteps of the British Empire and engage in expanding its domain.

Influence from Other Writers

Rudyard Kipling was notably influenced by writers such as Robert Armitage Sterndale, Robert Louis Stevenson , and H. Rider Haggard.

In 1907, Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the youngest yet to become the Nobel Prize Literature Laureate. It is said that his creativity, imagination, and his ability to create such incredible characters in his verses were the reasons for his win.

Rudyard Kipling had a unique upbringing and childhood. He was born in India and stayed there until the age of six when he and his sister Beatrice were sent to Britain to begin their education.

Rudyard Kipling was known for his fabulous use of words. One quote that stands out is, “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind,” which perfectly summarises the power of language.

Rudyard Kipling is arguably one of the most influential British poets of all time, known for his colonial-era works. Most famously, he wrote The Jungle Book , an iconic collection of stories and poems about animals. Kipling was equally adept at exploring themes of war, empire, and patriotism.

Although Rudyard Kipling is known for a variety of poetic forms, including ballads , hymns, and narrative poems , many of the same motifs run through his works. Kipling’s poetry is characterized by its vivid imagery and strong narrative voice , as well as its engagement with complex themes related to identity, power, and social hierarchy.

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Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling is one of the best-known of the late Victorian poets and story-tellers. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, his political views, which grew more toxic as he aged, have long made him critically unpopular. In the New Yorker, Charles McGrath remarked “Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.” However, Kipling’s works for children, above all his novel The Jungle Book, first published in 1894, remain part of popular culture through the many movie versions made and remade since the 1960s.

Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was principal of the Jeejeebyhoy School of Art, an architect and artist who had come to the colony, writes Charles Cantalupo in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “to encourage, support, and restore native Indian art against the incursions of British business interests.” He meant to try, Cantalupo continues, “to preserve, at least in part, and to copy styles of art and architecture which, representing a rich and continuous tradition of thousands of years, were suddenly threatened with extinction.” His mother, Alice Macdonald, had connections through her sister’s marriage to the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones with important members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in British arts and letters. Kipling spent the first years of his life in India, remembering it in later years as almost a paradise. “My first impression,” he wrote in his posthumously published autobiography Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, “is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.” In 1871, however, his parents sent him and his sister Beatrice—called “Trix”—to England, partly to avoid health problems, but also so that the children could begin their schooling. Kipling and his sister were placed with the widow of an old Navy captain named Holloway at a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth. Kipling and Trix spent the better part of the next six years in that place, which they came to call the “House of Desolation.” 1871 until 1877 were miserable years for Kipling. “In addition to feelings of bewilderment and abandonment” from being deserted by his parents, writes Mary A. O’Toole in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Kipling had to suffer bullying by the woman of the house and her son.” Kipling may have brought some of this treatment on himself—he was a formidably aggressive and pampered child. He once stamped down a quiet country road shouting: “Out of the way, out of the way, there’s an angry Ruddy coming!,” reports J.I.M. Stewart in his biography Rudyard Kipling, which led an aunt to reflect that “the wretched disturbances one ill-ordered child can make is a lesson for all time to me.” In Something of Myself, however, he recounted punishments that went far beyond correction. “I had never heard of Hell,” he wrote, “so I was introduced to it in all its terrors. … Myself I was regularly beaten.” On one occasion, after having thrown away a bad report card rather than bring it home, “I was well beaten and sent to school through the streets of Southsea with the placard ‘Liar’ between my shoulders.” At last, Kipling suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. An examination showed that he badly needed glasses—which helped explain his poor performance in school—and his mother returned from India to care for him. “She told me afterwards,” Kipling stated in Something of Myself, “that when she first came up to my room to kiss me good-night, I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff that I had been trained to expect.” Kipling did have some happy times during those years. He and his sister spent each December time with his mother’s sister, Lady Burne-Jones, at The Grange, a meeting-place frequented by English artisans such as William Morris—or “our Deputy ‘Uncle Topsy’” as Kipling called him in Something of Myself. Sir Edward Burne-Jones occasionally entered into the children’s play, Kipling recalled: “Once he descended in broad daylight with a tube of ‘Mummy Brown’ [paint] in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped—according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope—and—to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lies.” “But on a certain day—one tried to fend off the thought of it—the delicious dream would end,” he concluded, “and one would return to the House of Desolation, and for the next two or three mornings there cry on waking up.” In 1878, Kipling was sent off to school in Devon, in the west of England. The institution was the United Services College, a relatively new school intended to educate the sons of army officers, and Kipling was probably sent there because the headmaster was one Cormell Price, “one of my Deputy-Uncles at The Grange … ‘Uncle Crom.’” There Kipling formed three close friends, whom he later immortalized in his collection of stories Stalky Co, published in 1899. “We fought among ourselves ‘regular an’ faithful as man an’ wife,’” Kipling reported in Something of Myself, “but any debt which we owed elsewhere was faithfully paid by all three of us.” “I must have been ‘nursed’ with care by Crom and under his orders,” Kipling recalled. “Hence, when he saw I was irretrievably committed to the ink-pot, his order that I should edit the School Paper and have the run of his Library Study. … Heaven forgive me! I thought these privileges were due to my transcendent personal merits.” Since his parents could not afford to send him to one of the major English universities, in 1882 Kipling left the Services College, bound for India to rejoin his family and to begin a career as a journalist. For five years he held the post of assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore. During those years he also published the stories that became Plain Tales from the Hills, works based on British lives in the resort town of Simla, and Departmental Ditties, his first major collection of poems. In 1888, the young journalist moved south to join the Allahabad Pioneer, a much larger publication. At the same time, his works had begun to be published in cheap editions intended for sale in railroad terminals, and he began to earn a strong popular following with collections such as The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Tales, The Story of the Gadsbys, Soldiers Three, Under the Deodars, and “Wee Willie Winkie” and Other Child Stories. In March 1889 Kipling left India to return to England, determined to pursue his future as a writer there. The young writer’s reputation soared after he settled in London. “Kipling’s official biographer, C.E. Carrington,” declares Cantalupo, “calls 1890 ‘Rudyard Kipling’s year. There had been nothing like his sudden rise to fame since Byron.’” “His poems and stories,” writes O’Toole, “elicited strong reactions of love and hate from the start—almost none of his advocates and detractors were temperate in praise or in blame. Ordinary readers liked the rhythms, the cockney speech, and the imperialist sentiments of his poems and short stories; critics generally damned the works for the same reasons.” Many of his works were originally published in periodicals and later collected in various editions as Barrack-Room Ballads; famous poems such as “The Ballad of East and West,”“ Danny Deever ,” “Tommy,” and “The Road to Mandalay” date from this time. Kipling’s literary life in London brought him to the attention of many people. One of them was a young American publisher named Wolcott Balestier, who became friends with Kipling and persuaded him to work on a collaborative novel. The result, writes O’Toole, entitled The Naulahka, “reads more like one of Kipling’s travel books than like a novel” and “seems rather hastily and opportunistically concocted.” It was not a success. Balestier himself did not live to see the book published—he died on December 6, 1891—but he influenced Kipling strongly in another way. Kipling married Balestier’s sister, Caroline, in January, 1892, and the couple settled near their family home in Brattleboro, Vermont. The Kiplings lived in America for several years, in a house they built for themselves and called “Naulahka.” Kipling developed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, then Under Secretary of the Navy, and often discussed politics and culture with him. “I liked him from the first,” Kipling recalled in Something of Myself, “and largely believed in him. … My own idea of him was that he was a much bigger man than his people understood or, at that time, knew how to use, and that he and they might have been better off had he been born twenty years later.” Both of Kipling’s daughters were born in Vermont—Josephine late in 1892, and Elsie in 1894—as was one of the classic works of juvenile literature: The Jungle Books, which are ranked among Kipling’s best works. The adventures of Mowgli, the foundling child raised by wolves in the Seeonee Hills of India, are “the cornerstones of Kipling’s reputation as a children’s writer,” declared William Blackburn in Writers for Children , “and still among the most popular of all his works.” The Mowgli stories and other, unrelated works from the collection—such as “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and “The White Seal”—have often been filmed and adapted into other media. In Something of Myself, Kipling traced the origins of these stories to a book he had read when he was young “about a lion-hunter in South Africa who fell among lions who were all Freemasons, and with them entered into a confederacy against some wicked baboons.” Martin Seymour-Smith, writing in Rudyard Kipling: A Biography, identifies another of the major sources as “the Jataka tales of India. Some of these fables go back as early as the fourth century BC and incorporate material of even earlier eras. One version, Jatakamala, was composed in about 200 AD by the poet Aryasura. They are Buddhist birth-stories— Jatakamala means ‘Garland of Birth Stories’—which the 19th-century scholar Rhys Davids described as ‘the most important collection of ancient folk-lore extant.’ Each of the 550 stories tells of the Buddha in some previous incarnation, and each is a story of the past occasioned by some incident in the present. … Some of the beast fables resemble Aesop’s, but the Jataka tales are more deliberately brutal. They teach not merely that men should be more tender towards animals, but the equivalence of all life.” The Kiplings left Vermont in 1896 after a fierce quarrel with Beatty Balestier, Kipling’s surviving brother-in-law. The writer’s unwillingness to be interviewed made him unpopular with the American press, and he was savagely ridiculed when the facts of the case became public. Rather than remain in America, Kipling and his wife returned to England, settling for a time in Rottingdean, Sussex, near the home of Kipling’s parents. The writer soon published another novel, drawing on his knowledge of New England life: Captains Courageous, the story of Harvey Cheney, a spoiled young man who is washed overboard while on his way to Europe and is rescued by fishermen. Cheney spends the summer learning about human nature and self-discipline. “After the ship has docked in Gloucester and Harvey’s parents have come to take him home,” explains O’Toole, “his father, a self-made man, is pleased to see that his son has grown from a snobbish boy to a self-reliant young man who has learned how to make his own way through hard work and to judge people by their own merits rather than by their bank balances.” The Kiplings returned to America on several occasions, but this practice ended in 1899 when the whole family came down with pneumonia and Josephine, his eldest daughter, died from it. She had been, writes Seymour-Smith, “by all accounts …  unusually lively, witty and enchanting,” and her loss was deeply felt. Kipling sought solace in his work. In 1901 he published what many critics believe is his finest novel: Kim, the story of an orphaned Irish boy who grows up in the streets of Lahore, is educated at the expense of his father’s old Army regiment, and enters into “the Great Game,” the “cold war” of espionage and counter-espionage on the borders of India between Great Britain and Russia in the late 19th century. In many ways, Kipling suggested in Something of Myself, the book was a collaboration between himself and his father: “He would take no sort of credit for any of his suggestions, memories or confirmations,” the writer recalled, but “there was a good deal of beauty in it, and not a little wisdom; the best in both sorts being owed to my Father.” “The glory of Kim, ” declares O’Toole, “lies not in its plot nor in its characters but in its evocation of the complex Indian scene. The great diversity of the land—its castes; its sects; its geographical, linguistic, and religious divisions; its numberless superstitions; its kaleidoscopic sights, sounds, colors, and smells—are brilliantly and lovingly evoked.” In 1902 the Kiplings settled in their permanent home, a 17th-century house called “Bateman’s” in East Sussex. “In the years following the move,” O’Toole explains, “Kipling for the most part turned away from the types of stories he had written early in his career and explored new subjects and techniques.” One example, completed before the Kiplings occupied Bateman’s, was the collection called the Just So Stories, perhaps Kipling’s best-remembered and best-loved work. The stories, written for his own children and intended to be read aloud, deal with the beginnings of things: “How the Camel Got His Hump,” “The Elephant’s Child,” “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo,” “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” and many others. In these works, Kipling painted rich, vivid word-pictures that honor and at the same time parody the language of traditional Eastern stories such as the Jataka tales and the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “In no other collection of children’s stories,” writes Elisabeth R. Choi in her foreword to the 1978 Crown edition of the Just So Stories, “is there such fanciful and playful language.” The area around Bateman’s, rich in English history, inspired Kipling’s last works for children, Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel, Rewards and Fairies. The main sources of their inspiration, Kipling explained in Something of Myself, came from artifacts discovered in a well they were drilling on the property: “When we stopped at twenty-five feet, we had found a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a worn Cromwellian latten spoon and, at the bottom of all, the bronze cheek of a Roman horse-bit.” At the bottom of a drained pond, they “dredged two intact Elizabethan ‘sealed quarts’ … all pearly with the patina of centuries. Its deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge.” From these artifacts—and a suggestion made by a cousin, the ruins of an ancient forge, and the playing of his children—Kipling constructed a series of related stories of how Dan and Una come to meet Puck, the last remaining Old Thing in England, and from him learn the history of their land. Kipling wrote many other works during the periods that he produced his children’s classics. He was actively involved in the Boer War in South Africa as a war correspondent, and in 1917 he was assigned the post of “Honorary Literary Advisor” to the Imperial War Graves Commission—the same year that his son John, who had been missing in action for two years, was confirmed dead. In his last years, explains O’Toole, he became even more withdrawn and bitter, losing much of his audience because of his unpopular political views—such as compulsory military service—and a “cruelty and desire for vengeance [in his writings] that his detractors detested.” Modern critical opinions, O’Toole continues, “are contradictory because Kipling was a man of contradictions. He had enormous sympathy for the lower classes … yet distrusted all forms of democratic government.” He declined awards offered him by his own government, yet accepted others from foreign nations. He finally succumbed to a painful illness early in 1936.

Additional insight on Kipling’s life, career, and views can be gleaned from the three volumes of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. The volumes contain selected surviving letters written by Kipling between 1872 and 1910; it is believed that both Kipling and his wife destroyed many of Kipling’s other letters. Kipling’s chief correspondent was Edmonia Hill, who was his counselor and confidante beginning during his days as a journalist in India. Reviewers note that all of the letters reflect Kipling’s distinctive literary style. Jonathan Keates in the Observer wrote, “this gathering of survivors shows that Kipling, with his gift for the resonant, throat-grabbing phrase and his obsessive interest in watching and listening, could never write a dud letter.” John Bayley points out in the Times Literary Supplement : “[Kipling] wrote his letters, as he did his stories and early sketches, in an amalgam of Wardour Street and schoolboyese, with biblical overtones, often transposed into a sort of Anglo-Indian syntax. … Kipling is inimitable: at his innocently aesthetic worst, he can be deeply embarrassing; and the letters, like the stories, contain both sorts.” Writing in the Observer, Amit Chaudhuri remarks that the third volume of letters reveals “the contractions of a unique writer; a loving father and husband who was also deeply interested in the asocial, predominantly male pursuit of Empire; a conservative who succumbed to the romance of the new technology [the automobile]; an apologist for England for whom England was, in a fundamental and positive way, a ‘foreign country.’”

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(1865–1936). Millions of children have spent happy hours with Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Just So Stories about the land and people of India long ago. Kipling was a master storyteller. His songs, which are written in a strong marching rhythm, have the same popular style as his other writing.

Rudyard Kipling knew India well. He was born in Bombay on Dec. 30, 1865, when India was part of the British Empire. Beyond the cities and highways of British India, where the English lived, lay strange primitive country. Rudyard and his younger sister, Alice, had an Indian nurse who told them wonderful tales about the jungle animals. These stories remained in the boy’s memory.

When Rudyard was about 6, he and his sister were sent to England to be educated. They were left in the unhappy home of a retired naval officer at Southsea, where the boy was often punished by being forbidden to read. Rudyard almost ruined his eyes by reading in secret every book he could lay his hands on. In the story “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” Kipling later described the six miserable years the two children spent in this “house of desolation.”

In 1877 his mother came home from India and remade his world. He and his sister were taken to Devonshire to spend the summer with her. The next year his father came home on leave and took Rudyard to see the great Paris Exhibition, the beginning of Kipling’s lifelong love for France. At the end of this holiday the boy was sent to the United Service College at Westward Ho in Devonshire to be educated for the army. Rudyard read constantly—French literature, the English Bible, English poets, and storytellers such as Defoe. In this school also he developed a passionate faith in England and the English people. His years at Devonshire are recorded in Stalky & Co. , one of the best stories about schoolboys.

Kipling’s father was now principal of the Mayo School of Art at Lahore, in northwest India. When Rudyard was almost 17, he joined his family there. He became a reporter on the one daily newspaper in the Punjab, the Civil and Military Gazette. To get material for his newspaper articles he traveled around India for about seven years and came to know the country as few other Englishmen did.

Now Kipling began to write the poems and short stories about the British soldier in India that established his reputation as a writer. Such books as Plain Tales from the Hills , published in 1888, Soldiers Three (1888), and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) emerged. The slim volume of Departmental Ditties (1886) he edited, printed, published, and sold himself.

In 1890 his book The Light That Failed told of his efforts to make a living as a writer. When his reputation was firmly established, he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and started off with her on a trip around the world. They settled in Vermont, where their first child was born, and where Kipling wrote the tales that were to make up his Jungle Books (1894, 1895). Kipling’s father visited them and made the famous drawings that were published first, with the stories, in St. Nicholas.

Their family physician had once served with the Gloucester fishing fleet, and he persuaded Kipling to go to Gloucester for the annual memorial service for the men who had been lost or drowned during the year. From this experience came the inspiration for Captains Courageous (1897).

After four years in America, the Kiplings decided that their real home was in England. They rented a house in a Sussex village, where in 1897 their only son, John, was born.

The story that is known as Kim had been in Kipling’s mind for years. Now, stimulated by his father’s keen interest, he began to write it. The book was first published in 1901.

Long visits to South Africa, where the Kiplings formed a friendship with Cecil Rhodes, and another trip through North America varied the Sussex life. Early in 1902 they bought a house near the Sussex Downs. All around it was land that had been cultivated since before the Norman Conquest. Thus, stories about Roman times, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), were begun. Volumes of history cannot give the vital impression that these stories give of England’s past. Together they form a chain of “scents and sights and sounds” that reaches to the very heart of England and its history.

In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. World War I brought personal tragedy when his son was killed fighting in France with the Irish Guards. More and more he withdrew from the active scene, spending the greater part of the year in his Sussex farmhouse. When he was nearly 70 years old, he began to write his autobiography, Something of Myself . This curiously revealing book was published a year after his death.

Kipling died on Jan. 18, 1936, in the same month that brought the death of England’s king, George V. The writer was buried in Westminster Abbey among England’s honored sons.

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Rudyard Kipling Biography

Birthday: December 30 , 1865 ( Capricorn )

Born In: Mumbai, India

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short story writer and a novelist, chiefly remembered for his works for children and support for British imperialism. Born in British India in the middle of the nineteenth century, he was sent to England at the age of six for his education. Later he returned to India to begin his career as a journalist, but soon gave it up to return to his home country, where he concentrated full time on writing. After his marriage he lived for some years in Vermont, USA, before returning for good to England. He was a prolific writer whose children’s books are revered as classics of children’s literature. It is believed that at one point he was offered poet laureateship and on several occasions considered for knighthood, but he refused them. However, he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature, which made him the first English writer to receive the honor.

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Also Known As: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Died At Age: 70

Spouse/Ex-: Caroline Starr Balestier ​(m. 1892), Caroline Starr Balestier ​ (m. 1892)

father: John Lockwood Kipling

mother: Alice Kipling (née MacDonald)

siblings: Alice Kipling

children: Elsie Kipling, John Kipling, Josephine Kipling

Born Country: England

Nobel Laureates In Literature Poets

Died on: January 18 , 1936

place of death: London, England

education: United Services College

awards: 1907 - Nobel Prize in Literature

You wanted to know

When did rudyard kipling write "the jungle book".

Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Jungle Book" in 1894.

What inspired Rudyard Kipling to write "The Man Who Would Be King?"

Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write "The Man Who Would Be King" by his experiences in British India.

What is the significance of the poem "If—?"

The poem "If—" by Rudyard Kipling is known for its timeless wisdom and advice on how to navigate life's challenges with resilience and integrity.

What impact did Rudyard Kipling's travels have on his writing?

Rudyard Kipling's travels to various countries, including India and the United States, greatly influenced his writing by providing him with diverse cultural experiences and perspectives.

How did Rudyard Kipling's views on imperialism influence his work?

Rudyard Kipling's views on imperialism, which were complex and often criticized, are reflected in his works such as "The White Man's Burden" and "Kim."

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Rudyard Kipling had a pet mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which inspired one of his famous short stories.

Kipling was a proficient amateur artist and often illustrated his own works.

He was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1907.

Kipling was known for his love of the outdoors and spent much of his time exploring nature and wildlife.

He had a fascination with languages and was fluent in several, including English, Hindi, and French.

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Article contents

Kipling, (joseph) rudyard.

• Thomas Pinney
• https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34334
• Published in print: 23 September 2004
• Published online: 23 September 2004
• This version: 07 January 2016
• Previous version

(Joseph) Rudyard Kipling ( 1865–1936 )

by Sir Philip Burne-Jones , 1899

Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard ( 1865–1936 ), writer and poet , was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911) , professor of architectural sculpture in the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, and his wife, Alice Kipling [ see under Macdonald sisters ]. The name Joseph (never used) was family tradition, elder sons being named Joseph or John in alternation; ‘Rudyard’ came from Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents had first met. Both his father and his mother were the children of Methodist ministers, and both quietly rebelled against their evangelical origins. Kipling was brought up in indifference to organized religion; although he always believed in the reality of the spiritual, he never held any religious doctrine. His childish impressions of Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi—he recalled ' little Hindu temples ' with ' dimly-seen, friendly Gods ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 )—made him more sympathetic to those forms than to the charmless protestantism he afterwards encountered in England.

Early years and education

In 1871 the Kipling family, now including his younger sister Alice (always called Trix ), Rudyard's only sibling, returned to England on leave. On their return to India the parents left their children with people in Southsea, now part of Portsmouth, who had advertised their services in caring for the children of English parents in India. It was a usual practice for the children of the English in India to be thus separated from their parents, but Rudyard and his sister were not prepared for the event. ' We had had no preparation or explanation ', Kipling's sister wrote; ' it was like a double death, or rather, like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar ' ( Fleming , 171 ). Nor is it known why the parents chose to put them in the hands of paid guardians rather than with one or more members of Alice Kipling's family. One sister was married to Alfred Baldwin , a prosperous manufacturer: their child, about the same age as Rudyard , was Stanley Baldwin , afterwards prime minister; another sister had married Sir Edward Burne-Jones , the painter; a third sister had married Sir Edward Poynter , who became president of the Royal Academy. By 1871 all of these families would have been able and willing to receive the Kipling children.

Instead they went to Southsea, to a house now notorious as the House of Desolation (so-called in Kipling's 'Baa baa, black sheep' ). Kipling was not yet six years old; Trix was three. Here he attended ' a terrible little day-school ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). The woman who cared for them, Mrs Pryse Agar Holloway , is, in Kipling's account of her as Aunty Rosa, a monster. Deliberately cruel and unjust, she tries to set sister against brother, systematically humiliates the young Kipling , allows her son to terrorize him mentally and physically, and denies him simple pleasures. She also introduces a Calvinistic protestantism into Kipling's experience: ' I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors '. He took refuge in reading. One of his punishments was to be compelled to read devotional literature: in this way he acquired a mastery of biblical phrase and image. The Kipling children remained with Mrs Holloway for five and a half years: towards the end of that time, Kipling's eyesight began to fail, and to his other miseries were added ' the nameless terrors of broad daylight that were only coats on pegs after all '. Kipling's mother returned from India in April 1877, and for the rest of the year her children lived with her. At the beginning of the next year Kipling went off to public school; Trix returned to the care of Mrs Holloway .

The truth of Kipling's description of his childhood has been doubted: Mrs Holloway was not cruel but misunderstood by a spoiled, preternaturally imaginative child; 'Baa baa, black sheep' is fiction, not autobiography; or, if autobiography, then shamelessly self-indulgent. And how can one explain Trix's return to Southsea? We cannot now know the facts. The effects of Kipling's abandonment in the House of Desolation upon his psyche, and, in turn, upon his works, continues to be at the centre of biographical and interpretive arguments. Kipling's own judgement was that his sufferings ' drained me of any capacity for real, personal hate for the rest of my days ', a conclusion not generally agreed with. He also thought that the experience contributed to the growth of the artist: ' it demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). If he blamed his parents, that did not appear in his behaviour towards them; he was not merely dutiful and loving but seems genuinely to have admired them both.

Kipling believed that what ' saved ' him during his Southsea ordeal was an annual visit to his aunt, Georgiana Burne-Jones , at The Grange, in Fulham, London, where he ' possessed a paradise ' of ' love and affection ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). He was also much interested at The Grange in the example of his uncle at work and by Burne-Jones's conversations with such friends as William Morris , interests that Kipling's own artist father must have helped to encourage. We know little about Kipling's imaginative development until rather late in his school-days, but the impact of Burne-Jones and of the group to which he belonged, devoted to the highest standards of craftsmanship and to an unembarrassed worship of beauty, must be allowed to have had an important part in forming Kipling .

At the beginning of 1878 Kipling was sent to the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Bideford, north Devon, founded in 1874 by army officers in order to provide an affordable public school for their sons. Most of the students had the army as their goal. The headmaster, Cormell Price , an Oxford graduate, was a friend from early days of both Burne-Jones and of Kipling's mother. The new, raw, impoverished school was an unlikely place, but, after a long period of unhappiness following his entry, Kipling thrived there. For this happy result he always credited Price , whose virtues he magnified in the figure of the Head in Stalky & Co. ; more practically, he remained devoted to Price to the end of his days, helping him financially in his retirement and, after Price's death, acting as a trustee for Price's son. It is now impossible to see Kipling's school-days uncoloured by Stalky & Co. (1899), Kipling's fictional version of his life at Westward Ho! The bare facts that we have are often mildly at variance with Stalky , but the energy of the Stalky version overwhelms all attempts to correct the record. One may safely say that Kipling did make friends with Lionel Dunsterville (Stalky), with G. C. Beresford (M'Turk), was himself a recognizable original for Beetle, and was impressed more than he knew by the example of William Carr Crofts (King) and his passion for Latin literature. He admired Price , was given the run of Price's library, and edited the school paper, revived by Price for the express purpose of allowing Kipling to edit it. He also began to experiment in poetry, the form of literature he loved first and best. The extent and variety of Kipling's precocious exercises in poetry have been made clear in Andrew Rutherford's edition, Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling (1986), which includes fluent imitations of popular ballads, Pope , Keats , Browning , and Swinburne , among many others. In 1881 his parents privately printed a selection of this work under the title Schoolboy Lyrics . Though it was produced without Kipling's knowledge, and though he was embarrassed by it then and afterwards, the book is technically Kipling's first and is now one of the rarissima in his bibliography.

Despite the army flavour of the United Services College, Kipling's interests at the time seem to have been almost wholly literary. His school-days ended in May 1882; an indifferent school record and his parents' lack of means put Oxford and Cambridge out of the question. For a brief time Kipling flirted with the idea of medicine (an admiration for doctors and an interest in the art of healing always remained with him). Kipling's parents were both occasional contributors to the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) , published in Lahore, where, in 1875, John Lockwood Kipling had been appointed head of both the newly founded Mayo School of Art and of the Lahore Museum. Through his parents' influence with the proprietors of the paper Kipling was offered a position as sub-editor and went to India in September 1882, arriving in Lahore towards the end of October. For the next six years and four months Kipling was to work uninterruptedly on newspapers in India.

Journalist in India

Though he was at first kept to routine editorial work, gradually Kipling began to write more, and more variously, for the paper—verse, an irregular column of local gossip, summaries of official reports, news paragraphs, and the like. In March 1884 he was sent to Patiala to report a state visit of the viceroy, and his success in this trial was such that from that point on the flow of his writing in the CMG is unchecked. The overflow found other outlets. In 1884 he and his sister published a collection of verses titled Echoes , exhibiting English life in India in the form of parodies of standard poets: Kipling's knowledge of American literature appears in his parodies of Emerson , Longfellow , and Joaquin Miller . For Christmas 1885 all four Kiplings published an annual called Quartette , containing such distinguished early work as 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes' and 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' . These exhibit the remarkably precocious maturity— Kipling was not yet twenty when they were written—that prompted Henry James to write of Kipling as a youth who ' has stolen the formidable mask of maturity and rushes about making people jump with the deep sounds, the sportive exaggerations of tone, that issue from its painted lips ' ( James ).

In 1886 Kipling published Departmental Ditties , lightly satirical verses about official life in India reprinted from the CMG . This, which Kipling always regarded as his first book, had a great success among the community it satirized. It also drew a brief, friendly notice from Andrew Lang in London, Kipling's first recognition in England.

As a journalist, Kipling was neither a civil servant nor a military officer, but could move freely among the different levels of Lahore society. The capital of the Punjab, Lahore abounded in high officials. It was also an army post, and Kipling discovered a new pleasure in observing and making friends with the officers and men of the British troops stationed at Fort Lahore and at Mian Mir , the nearby barracks. He wandered through the streets of Lahore at night, and though he claimed afterwards to have seen perhaps more of native life than in fact he did, he certainly paid that life more sympathetic attention than usually allowed to the English in India. In 1886, while still under age, he joined the masonic lodge Hope and Perseverance of Lahore, and was active in its affairs while he remained in Lahore. The prominence of masonic lore and masonic symbolism in Kipling's work from this time on is a recognized critical topic, as is the attraction to fraternal or exclusive organizations (for example Stalky & Co., Soldiers Three, the Seonee Pack, the Janeites) witnessed by his membership in the freemasons.

In November 1887 Kipling , now recognized as one of the best journalists in India, was transferred by his proprietors to their other, larger paper, The Pioneer , of Allahabad. Lahore had been Muslim; Allahabad, on the banks of the Ganges, was Hindu. Kipling made no secret of his preference for the Muslim element in India, a preference only reinforced by his residence in Allahabad. His work now mostly consisted in providing verse or fiction for his paper, or in carrying out special assignments. Kipling now travelled round India to produce the articles collected in From Sea to Sea (1900) as 'Letters of marque' , 'The city of dreadful night' , 'Among the railway folk' , and 'The Giridh coal-fields' , articles that combined the oldest India with the newest one of railways, factories, and other works of the raj. Before he went to Allahabad Kipling had been publishing a series of stories in the CMG under the title 'Plain Tales from the Hills' , the hills being the high foothills of the Himalayas at Simla, the summer capital of British India where Kipling had spent several of his summer leaves. Simla society, with its gossip, jealousies, amours, and other amusements, gave Kipling his material; the 'Plain Tales' were a sort of 'Departmental Ditties' converted to prose and somewhat more serious. In book form Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) was an immediate hit.

Early in 1888 Kipling's proprietors, confident of their star young employee's productive power, made him editor of a new weekly supplement to The Pioneer called the Week's News , which provided a page to be filled each week with a new fiction. Kipling now began to pour out the stories that, collected and reprinted in the series of paperbacks called the Railway Library , made his name in India and, soon enough, in England and America as well. Carrying modestly anonymous illustrated covers drawn by John Lockwood Kipling , the series of volumes—the product of a single year—included Soldiers Three (1888), The Story of the Gadsbys (1888), In Black and White (1889), Under the Deodars (1889), The Phantom 'Rickshaw (1889), and Wee Willie Winkie (1889). This prodigality was no fluke. Kipling , throughout his career, always found more opportunities for fiction and poetry bidding for his attention than he could possibly respond to. As he wrote to his sister late in life, the ideas kept ' rising in the head … one behind the other ' ( Kipling , letter, 8–10 March 1931 ). And so it always was.

Return to England and early fame

India was now too small for Kipling . Before the end of 1888 he had determined to return to England to try his fortunes as a writer, and early in March 1889 he sailed from Calcutta for London. He reversed the usual route and travelled to Singapore, China, and Japan, before crossing the north Pacific to San Francisco and then across the United States. He sent back stories at every stage of his journey to The Pioneer , later collected in From Sea to Sea . His companions on the voyage were Professor and Mrs Alex Hill , friends from Allahabad. Mrs Hill , an American, was more than an ordinary friend; she had been confidante and muse to Kipling and had exercised a strong attraction upon him during the entire period of his life in Allahabad. While staying with her family in Pennsylvania towards the end of his journey Kipling became engaged to her sister, Caroline Taylor . The engagement did not long survive Kipling's return to England, but it is a curious episode in his emotional life, apparently having more to do with his feelings towards Mrs Hill than towards her sister. The articles that Kipling sent back to India during his travels across the Pacific and the Atlantic were typical of his youthful manner—enthusiastic, unrestrained, sometimes tactless, but always striking and vivid. One of them reports his pilgrimage to the greatly admired Mark Twain in upstate New York. On his travels across the American continent Kipling saw reason to confirm his already formed opinion of the United States as an attractive but violent and lawless community. Did he in fact see a man shot dead in a Chinese gambling-hell in San Francisco? No matter. He wrote as though he had. Americans were a people ' without the Law '.

Kipling at last arrived in England early in October 1889, took chambers in London, and almost at once entered into his fame. Some editors already knew his work, or had heard of it; others needed only to see some of it to bid eagerly for it. He had no interval of starving in a garret (nor did he ever have to worry about money) but rather had to defend himself against demands he could not possibly meet. He encountered this sudden success warily: publishers were rascals; editors wanted only to skim one's brains; the public cared only for the latest celebrity, no sooner exalted than cast aside. Kipling was determined that he would have nothing to do with this. He put his literary affairs in the hands of an agent and for the rest of his life had no direct dealings with publishers. He would be identified with no literary clique, and he sought to avoid publicity. He did join the Savile Club, and was gratified by the friendship of such men as Andrew Lang , H. Rider Haggard , Edmund Gosse , Thomas Hardy , and Sir Walter Besant . In the course of his life Kipling would have many other literary and artistic acquaintances— Henry James , for example, whose achievement Kipling fully appreciated—but he did not seek them out, and always seemed to prefer public men or men of action, Theodore Roosevelt or Dr Jameson , for example. A more agreeable side of this stand-offishness was Kipling's resolve never to criticize or to comment in print on the work of his fellow authors, a resolve strictly maintained throughout his life, despite the fact that his private comments and indirect published remarks show him to have been an extremely shrewd judge.

Kipling's return to London at the end of 1889 began a quarter-century of unbroken production of literary work of the highest originality, distinction, and popularity: three novels, four volumes of poems, twelve volumes of stories, including such unclassifiable inventions as the Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill , four volumes of essays and sketches, and much miscellaneous writing, some of it uncollected, came from his pen between 1890 and 1914. It would be difficult to match this record for sustained quantity, variety, and quality in the whole of English literature. Kipling's fame grew immense, and was matched by his sales, which were measured in the millions world-wide and which were never much affected by the chops and changes in his critical reputation.

Kipling's first impact upon a wide public was as the poet of British India, including the British tommy, a subject quite new to most readers. It is likely that, despite all Kipling's varied later work, the Indian association will always come first whenever his name is mentioned. Kipling's ‘imperialism’ did not crystallize until after his return to England, when he saw that the realities of the empire at work were unknown to the people at home; thereafter it was a part of his artistic purpose to give a voice to the administrators, the soldiers, and their women who made the empire function. Two ideas running through his work arise in connection with his imagination of India but are not confined to it: the notion of a ‘law’ that must be obeyed as the condition of human society, and the notion that what we do is set for us by the conditions of our situation—by ‘history’. Thus Kipling's ‘imperialists’ are not swashbuckling conquistadores but men whose work has been laid upon them: in this sense they do not differ from the English at home or from any other historical community. Another theme, not yet much apparent but always present, was that of the occult—of things beyond the grasp of reason but nevertheless powerful. Kipling the man, as opposed to the artist, was hostile to such ideas: he held that his sister's long periods of mental disturbance were partly caused by the ' soul-destroying business of “spiritualism” ' ( Kipling , letter, 3 June 1927 ). Nevertheless, many stories, from the early 'Phantom 'Rickshaw' to the late 'Wish House' , show how strongly Kipling the artist was drawn in that direction. Another marked interest was in giving to every kind of creature a voice—from the dialect of Soldiers Three to the canine speech of Thy Servant a Dog (1930): in doing this, Kipling displays one of the largest vocabularies in English literature.

When Kipling burst upon the public in 1889 he was just about to turn twenty-four. A short, slight man, his notable features were bushy dark eyebrows, penetrating bright blue eyes behind thick spectacles, a full, bristling moustache, and a prominent cleft chin. These made him an easy mark for the caricaturists, the most formidable of them Max Beerbohm , upon whom Kipling long exercised the fascination of abomination. Kipling was beginning to lose his hair at the time he left India, and by the end of the 1890s he was bald on top, a strong contrast to the bushy eyebrows and moustache. He was inordinately fond of tobacco, as was his father, and enjoyed it in cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Otherwise he was temperate in his habits, though he knew and enjoyed good food and wine until illness denied it to him ( George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book is dedicated to Kipling ). Drunkenness he abhorred. His defective eyesight is supposed to have adversely affected his athletic ability, but he at least attempted to play polo and tennis in India. Fishing especially appealed to him, and he seems to have been at least a competent fly-fisherman. His daughter remembered him as ' compact of neatness and energy. He never fumbled, and his gestures were alway expressive ' ( Carrington , 517 ).

Kipling was no ordinary reader, but consumed books of every kind, rapidly and in large numbers. His years of journalism had taught him that no subject was without interest, and he enjoyed forms of print not usually regarded as attractive, including blue books (official government reports). Although a literary traditionalist, who knew English literature thoroughly and French literature well, and who delighted in the Latin of Horace , Kipling read widely in current literature as a matter of course. He claimed to be unmusical, though he was acutely sensitive to metrical form. Painting interested him, as one would expect in a man whose father and two of whose uncles were professional artists, and his own work in illustrating the Just So Stories shows that he had a distinct gift. But he does not seem to have paid any special attention to the graphic arts.

Within the first two years of his entering the London literary life, Kipling produced The Light that Failed (1890), Life's Handicap (1891), The Naulahka (1892, in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier ), Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and most of the stories collected in Many Inventions (1893); to this one may add Plain Tales from the Hills and the six volumes of the Railway Library , now reprinted from the Indian editions for the British and American public. Readers who had not heard of Kipling at the beginning of 1890 could have a whole shelf of Kipling by the end of 1892. Kipling several times broke down under the strain of his work, a strain complicated by the confusions of his personal life. The engagement to Caroline Taylor ended early in 1890; at the same time he encountered again a woman named Flo Garrard , to whom he had imagined himself engaged when he left England for India and who contributed to the figure of Maisie in The Light that Failed . Kipling renewed his pursuit of Flo Garrard for a time, unsuccessfully.

Marriage and residence in the United States

In August 1891 Kipling set out on a voyage around the southern hemisphere, making his first visit to South Africa and his only visits to New Zealand and Australia. In December he reached Lahore, where he learned of the sudden death of his friend, the American Wolcott Balestier , with whom he had collaborated on the romance called The Naulahka , and to whom Barrack-Room Ballads was dedicated. Kipling immediately left Lahore (he was never to return to India), arrived in London early in January, and at once married Balestier's sister, Caroline (1862–1939) , by special licence on 18 January 1892. This curious story has never been elucidated, and hardly any record survives of the early history of the Balestier – Kipling relation. It has been suggested that the attraction between Wolcott Balestier and Kipling was homosexual, but, if so, it is hard to see how that explains Kipling's marriage to the sister. Kipling and Caroline Balestier had been known to each other since 1890 and there is some reason to think that there had been an understanding between them before Kipling set off on his voyage. Many, but by no means all, of those who knew the Kiplings did not like Mrs Kipling , finding her dictatorial, selfish, and ill-spirited. Whatever others thought, Rudyard and Caroline appear to have been happy in each other and maintained a steady mutual respect and affection through forty-four years of marriage.

They travelled as far as Japan on their wedding-journey, when the failure of Kipling's bank drove them back to Vermont, where Mrs Kipling's family then lived. There they bought property near Brattleboro, built a house, and began a family: Josephine , their first child, was born in 1893, Elsie , their second, in 1896. Kipling flourished in the isolation of Vermont in the citadel of his own house: here he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Captains Courageous (1897), and most of the stories collected in The Day's Work (1898); he also published the second collection of his poems, The Seven Seas (1896), mostly written between 1892 and 1896. He hoped in time to write stories about America ( Captains Courageous is a very restricted venture); in the meantime, the subject of India grew steadily less prominent in his work. On his fairly frequent expeditions out of Vermont, Kipling made the acquaintance of a wide range of distinguished Americans, including Charles Eliot Norton , Theodore Roosevelt , Samuel Langley , Henry Adams , and Brander Matthews . Nevertheless, the American episode ended badly. Kipling was much troubled by the anti-English spirit aroused by a border dispute between Britain and Venezuela at the end of 1895. In 1896 he quarrelled with his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier , had him arrested for threatened violence, and was humiliated in a courtroom hearing. In September the Kiplings left Vermont for England.

After a false start in Devon they settled at The Elms, Rottingdean, Sussex, where the Burne-Joneses also had a house. Here, in August 1897, the Kiplings' last child and only son, John , was born. Early in 1899 Kipling , with some idea of repairing his American relations, took his family to New York; there he and the children fell ill. Josephine and Kipling developed pneumonia, and for many days in February and March Kipling's struggle against death was headline news across the United States. At the crisis of Kipling's illness, Josephine died, unknown to him. Not until June was Kipling strong enough to return to England, never to visit the United States again.

While recuperating Kipling put together the articles in From Sea to Sea (2 vols., 1900), compelled by pirated American editions thus to reprint early work that he would otherwise have left in obscurity. About this time Kipling fought several cases in the American courts, always unsuccessfully, against what he regarded as piratical publishing. Stalky & Co. appeared at the end of 1899; Kim , which Kipling had matured for nearly a decade, in 1901; the Just So Stories , begun as stories for Josephine , were published serially from 1897 and collected in 1902. Kipling called Kim ' a labour of great love ' and thought it ' a bit more wise and temperate than much of my stuff ' ( 15 Jan 1900, Letters , 3.11 ). It is, effectively, his farewell to India, in the form of a romance that has pleased even many of those not disposed to like Kipling's work.

South Africa and England

After his serious illness Kipling was advised to spend his winters out of England. In the winter of 1898 he had taken his family to South Africa, where he had met Rhodes and Milner and had travelled as far as Bulawayo. He now determined to make South Africa his regular winter home, a decision that coincided with the outbreak of the South African War.

From this time until he abandoned it in 1908, South Africa played a large part in Kipling's life. His admiration for Rhodes , Milner , and Jameson was unqualified. In South Africa in the spring of 1900 he was delighted to serve briefly, at Lord Roberts's invitation, on the staff of a paper called The Friend , got out for the troops at Bloemfontein. Two of the journalists he met on the staff, Perceval Landon and H. A. Gwynne , remained lifelong friends. Kipling's one experience of live battle was outside Bloemfontein in March 1900.

South Africa and the war reinvigorated Kipling : ' I'm glad I didn't die last year ', he wrote from Cape Town ( 7 April 1900, Letters , 2.14 ). The experience did him no good with his public, however. The British unpreparedness exposed by the early Boer successes persuaded Kipling and many others that the country needed fresh discipline. Kipling now took up the theme of preparedness through compulsory military service, and his hectoring of the British public on this subject (for example in 'The Islanders' ) alienated many readers. The poems of The Five Nations (1903) and the stories of Traffics and Discoveries (1904) are the main literary memorials of Kipling's South African adventure, but they are not only that. Two stories in the collection— 'They' and 'Mrs. Bathurst' —embody a delicacy of suggestion and a richness of allusion greater, perhaps, than what had been seen in Kipling's work before. They mark out the line of development leading to the great stories of Kipling's last decade. The contrast from this point on in Kipling's life between the stridency of his political views and the wide sympathy of his work shows how little we understand the relations of politics to literature. Unfortunately, much of Kipling's work continues to be judged through a simple connection of the two.

When Kipling and his family returned to Cape Town at the end of 1900 they lived in a house called The Woolsack, built for them by Rhodes in the grounds of his Cape Town estate. Here Kipling and his wife consulted with Rhodes about his scheme for international scholarships at Oxford ( Kipling was later a Rhodes trustee), and here Kipling dreamed about a South African future after Rhodes's ideas, in which a dominant English population would create a golden peace and prosperity. The dreams were shattered by the great Liberal victory in Britain in 1906, followed by the return to responsible government of the Boers. Kipling saw this as the destruction of all that Rhodes had worked for; after a last stay in the winter of 1908 he left, bitterly disappointed, never to return to South Africa.

Kipling now turned to English history on the widest possible basis. In 1902 he bought a seventeenth-century house called Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, where he spent the rest of his life, and where he made himself master of the traditions and topography of the region (the house is now a Kipling memorial owned by the National Trust ). He was helped in this by the advent of automobile travel, of which he was an early and enthusiastic champion. As he wrote in April 1904,

The chief end of my car is the discovery of England. To me it is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries; and a day in the car in an English county is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real and yet none the less delightfully mixed up with books.

Locomotion always fascinated Kipling , and to stories about ships ( 'The Ship that Found Itself' ) or trains ( '.007' ) or airships in the future ( 'With the Night Mail' ) were now added car stories ( 'Steam Tactics' ). The ' discovery of England ' was embodied in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), supplemented by the poems that Kipling contributed to the History of England (1911), written as a school text by the Oxford historian C. R. L. Fletcher . Actions and Reactions (1909), a very miscellaneous collection, includes stories from 1899 to 1909. Songs from Books (1912) brings together the many poems contained within or accompanying Kipling's stories.

In the first decade of the twentieth century Kipling was at the height of his fame and prestige, notwithstanding the discordant notes that began to be heard during the South African War. In 1907 he toured Canada, preaching the gospel of empire all the more emphatically now that South Africa was lost; his reception was not that of a private person but of a state dignitary, as he crossed and re-crossed the continent in a private rail car. His observations on this occasion appear in Letters to the Family (1908). In 1907 he was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Durham and by Oxford, and at the end of the year he received the Nobel prize for literature, the first English writer to be so distinguished. In the next year Cambridge gave him an honorary degree. Kipling refused all the official honours offered him, including the Order of Merit, because he did not wish to be identified with any government. He was never formally offered the Laureateship, but he would have refused it on the same grounds.

Deeply out of sympathy with the Liberal government, whose ' corruption ' he attacked in the savage verses in 'Gehazi' , and distressed by the social tensions expressed in the great strikes of 1910–12, Kipling saw the struggle over home rule as a test of strength between the forces of preservation and dissolution. When civil war and a rebellion of the army threatened over the fate of Ulster in 1914, Kipling joined the League of the British Covenant , helped to form refugee committees, made an inflammatory speech against the government, and published such passionate verses as 'Ulster' and 'The Covenant' .

The war years

All this was swept away in a moment by the outbreak of the First World War in August. Kipling put his writing entirely at the service of the war effort, as the record of his publication in these years shows: The New Army in Training (1915); France at War (1915), from Kipling's tour as a correspondent in France; The Fringes of the Fleet (1915), on the naval auxiliaries, submarines, and patrols; Sea Warfare (1916), partly written from reports furnished by the Admiralty ; The Eyes of Asia (1918), written from the letters of Indian troops in England; and the series of articles from the Italian front called 'The war in the mountains' (1917), never published separately by Kipling . A Diversity of Creatures (1917) had been planned for publication in October 1914, but postponed: Kipling was careful to date the stories so that they could be seen to be pre-war compositions. The last two stories in the collection— 'Swept and Garnished' and the much-misunderstood 'Mary Postgate' — had obviously been written after the outbreak of the war and needed no dating.

John Kipling , who had been commissioned in the Irish Guards at the outset of the war, had gone to France in August 1915; in September, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he was reported wounded and missing in the battle of Loos. His body was never found in Kipling's lifetime: the grave was identified in 1992. John's death coincided with the onset of Kipling's suffering from the undiagnosed duodenal ulcer that tormented the last twenty years of his life and that at last killed him. Under these afflictions, as the war dragged on, Kipling grew more bitter, his hatred of the Germans more violent. The exhilaration he had felt in the early days of the South African War was now replaced by a melancholy weariness in the face of the war's great destruction. When the armistice came at last he fled to Bateman's from the rejoicing in London: ' I … had my dark hour alone ' ( 18 Nov 1918, Letters , 4.520 ). To the end, Kipling regarded the peace settlement as a betrayal; the conduct of the United States in remaining for so long neutral was an irredeemable dishonour. Kipling's first book to be published after his years in the service of the war were ended was the volume of poems called The Years Between (1919); some of these, from before the war, reflected the turbulent political conflicts of those days; others, recording the experiences of the war, varied from savage to desolate. It is by far the darkest of all Kipling's collections.

After the war

The war remained constantly present to Kipling through two of his activities. He was made a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917, and served conscientiously until his death. He attended committees, wrote publicity for the commission, chose or composed inscriptions for its memorials, and visited its cemeteries in his travels on the continent and the Near East. In 1917 he also accepted an invitation to write the war history of his son's regiment, the Irish Guards . This work occupied him until 1923, when The Irish Guards in the Great War appeared in two volumes. His only other book in the first years after the war was Letters of Travel (1892–1913) (1920), a collection of travel articles from Kipling's wedding journey in 1892, his Canadian tour of 1907, and his first visit to Egypt in 1913. This, like A Diversity of Creatures , had been planned for publication in 1914 but was deferred by the war.

Kipling worked despite increasing illness, marked by frequent and unpredictable bouts of violent pain. Different doctors made different diagnoses, all of them wrong. In 1921 the diagnosis was ' septic foci of the teeth ', and all of his teeth were removed. In 1922 (he then weighed under 9 stone ) he was operated on for a ' twisted bowel '. Not until 1933 was a duodenal ulcer diagnosed by doctors in Paris, too late to provide any relief. His wife's health was also deteriorating in ways that put much strain on Kipling too: she was rheumatic, diabetic, and depressive. Even before the war she had sought hydropathic treatment in the south of France; from 1915 on they were frequently in Bath for the same purpose. Their travels after the war were largely quests for the warmth that would relieve her pains: Algeria, Spain, Sicily, Egypt, Brazil, the Caribbean, and, especially, the south of France. France was, of all countries, the one that Kipling most enjoyed, and for many years he explored it by car with undiminished pleasure in its people and places.

The Kiplings continued to entertain regularly at Bateman's and to visit London often, where their headquarters were at Brown's Hotel. They were faithful to old friends; by this time, perhaps inevitably, a larger proportion of them were titled, official, or wealthy than had been the case before the war. Many among Kipling's young friends were those he made in his son's regiment, the Irish Guards : one of these, Captain George Bambridge MC , married Kipling's surviving child, Elsie , in 1924. The marriage was childless.

Owing mostly to his ill health, Kipling's production sank in the years between the end of the war and his death. Some of what he published now was not new but a gathering-up of existing work: Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923) includes stories from 1893 to 1923; A Book of Words (1928) collects Kipling's speeches from 1906 to 1927. Some of the speeches, in effect brief essays to be spoken, are highly characteristic and interesting. Most important of the retrospective publications is Verse: Inclusive Edition , in three volumes (1919): this was Kipling's effort to arrange his poetical work, and was followed by one-volume editions in 1927 and 1933. He also began work on the great collected edition of his work published posthumously (though signed by Kipling ) as the Sussex Edition (1937–9). This was planned by Macmillan as a monument to the author who had been a pillar of the firm's prosperity and is one of the most splendid of modern editions.

Kipling , who always liked to give speech to the speechless, and who had always been a dog-lover, combined these inclinations in a series of stories collected as Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930). Kipling also took a professional interest in the film adaptations of his work, which went back at least to 1911. In 1921 he worked on scripts from 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows' , 'Soldiers Three' , and 'Without Benefit of Clergy' : only the last of these was filmed. He helped develop the script for the unsuccessful One Family produced by the Empire Marketing Board in 1930, and he reviewed the scripts for Captains Courageous and Wee Willie Winkie , both released in 1937, after Kipling's death. If Kipling's production diminished through illness, what he managed to produce was nevertheless of the highest distinction. Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932) show Kipling's art in its richest maturity in such stories as 'The Wish House' , 'The Eye of Allah' , 'The Gardener' , 'Dayspring Mishandled' , and 'The Church that was at Antioch' , to name no more. The themes of self-sacrifice, of healing, and of indestructible love are prominent in these.

On 12 January 1936, two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Kipling and his wife were at Brown's Hotel, en route for the south of France, when he was stricken by haemorrhage from a perforated ulcer. Taken to the Middlesex Hospital, he was operated on the next day and died there on 18 January, his wedding anniversary. He was cremated at Golders Green, Middlesex, and the ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on 23 January. It was noted that the pallbearers included no literary men but, as his biographer C. E. Carrington put it, ' the Prime Minister, an Admiral, a General, the Master of a Cambridge College, Professor Mackail from Oxford, Sir Fabian Ware , and two old friends H. A. Gwynne and A. P. Watt ' ( p. 506 ). Some months before his death Kipling had begun work on an autobiography. This incomplete work was published posthumously as Something of Myself: for my Friends Known and Unknown (1937).

Kipling's critical reputation—as distinguished from his popularity among readers—has never been very firmly fixed. Even when the novelty and brilliance of his work had dazzled the public at the beginning of the 1890s, there had been doubting and hesitant voices, troubled by the excesses, the ' hooliganism ', the ' vulgarity ' of Kipling's work. His enthusiasm for the English cause in the South African War alienated many, and his constant urging of preparedness grew tedious and offensive, as did his accusations of corruption against the government. Others never reconciled themselves to the disappearance of India from Kipling's stories and poems. And there was certainly some reaction against the mere fact of his prominence: he had begun so early and had become so famous that, in time, a certain weariness of response was inevitable. He was so quotable (more than eighty entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations ) that he dwindled into cliché. After the war, when formal experiment was demanded as a necessary sign of belonging to the present, the apparent conventionality of Kipling's stories and poems made him easy to disregard. Among the young, Kipling could be—and was—thought of as a dead author, belonging to a dead order of faith in the empire. When, after the next war, the parts of the empire became independent countries and everything associated with the colonial became anathema, it was remembered that Kipling had admired the colonial idea. To a generation whose critical guides had not led them to read Kipling , this seemed enough to know. The censorship of political correctness habitually barred Kipling from a place among school texts in the United States in the late twentieth century.

The labels that are conventionally attached to Kipling —' imperialist ', ' racist ', ' jingoist '—express a very superficial knowledge of his work, which eludes all labels in its range and variety. There has yet been no writer of short stories in English to challenge his achievement, which ranges through space from India to the home counties, and through time from Stone Age man to the contemporary world of football matches and motor cars. These stories, moreover, exhibit every kind of treatment, from the farcical to the tragic, and their structures vary from the simplest anecdote to the most complex and allusive philosophical fiction, dense enough to support endless exegesis and commentary. He excelled in stories of adventure ( 'The Man who would be King' ), as well as in stories of obscure English life ( 'The Wish House' ). He excelled in historical fiction ( 'The Eye of Allah' ). He excelled in stories for children ( Just So Stories ) and in that kind of story that appeals both to child and adult ( Puck of Pook's Hill ) according, as he said, ' to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself ). He created a great picaresque romance in Kim . His stories touch the occult at one extreme ( 'A Madonna of the Trenches' ) and the technicalities of modern machinery at the other ( 'The Devil and the Deep Sea' ). No list can begin to exhaust the possibilities. And what may be said of his prose work may apply even more strongly to his poetry, whose extraordinary variety of form and content is only now beginning to be appreciated. Among modern writers in English, only Thomas Hardy can be compared to Kipling for high achievement in both poetry and prose. Kipling's work is not only of the highest artistic excellence, it is deeply humane and fully expresses the sense of one of his favourite texts: ' Praised be Allah for the diversity of his creatures. '

• R. Kipling, Something of myself and other autobiographical writings , ed. T. Pinney (1990)
• The letters of Rudyard Kipling , ed. T. Pinney, 4 vols. (1990–99)
• C. E. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling : his life and work , rev. edn (1978)
• Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (1978)
• R. E. Harbord, ed., The readers' guide to Rudyard Kipling's work , 8 vols. (1961–9)
• R. Kipling, Early verse , ed. A. Rutherford (1986)
• A. K. Fleming, ‘Some childhood memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers's Journal (March 1939), 168–72
• A. K. Fleming, ‘Some childhood memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers's Journal (July 1939), 506–11
• R. Kipling, letters, 8–10 March 1931, U. Sussex , Kipling MSS
• H. James, ‘Introduction’, Mine own people (1891)
• J. M. S. Tompkins, The art of Rudyard Kipling (1959)
• R. Kipling, letter to Edith Macdonald, 3 June 1927, U. Sussex , Kipling MSS
• Bodl. Oxf. , corresp.
• Col. U., Butler Library , corresp. and literary papers
• Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, corresp., family corresp., and literary papers
• Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, corresp. and literary papers
• Harvard U., Houghton L. , corresp. and papers
• Hunt. L. , corresp. and literary papers
• L. Cong. , corresp. and papers
• NL Aus. , corresp.
• NRA , corresp. and literary MSS
• Princeton University, New Jersey, papers
• Ransom HRC , corresp. and literary papers
• Syracuse University, New York, George Arents Research Library, corresp. and literary papers
• U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library , corresp.
• U. Sussex Library, corresp. and literary papers
• University of Rochester, New York, Rush Rhees Library, corresp. and papers
• Yale U. , papers
• BL , corresp. with Macmillans and corrected proofs, Add. MSS 54940, 55846–55875
• BL , corresp. with Society of Authors, Add. MS 56734
• Bodl. Oxf. , corresp. with Lady Milner
• CKS , corresp. with Lady Milner
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission, corresp. and papers relating to Imperial War Graves Commission
• Hagley Hall, Hagley, Worcestershire, letters to the Leonard family
• Kipling Society, London, letters to J. H. C. Brooking
• Magd. Cam. , papers
• McGill University, Montreal, McLennan Library, family corresp. with Lockwood and Meta de Forest
• Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, corresp. with James Watson Barry
• NMM , letters to Sir Percy Bates
• NMM , letters to Leslie Cope–Cornford
• Norfolk RO , letters to Sir Henry Rider Haggard
• Parl. Arch. , corresp. with Lord Beaverbrook
• Parl. Arch. , corresp. with John St Loe Strachey
• PRONI , corresp. with Edward Carson
• Richmond Local Studies Library, London, corresp. with Douglas Sladen
• U. Sussex Library, corresp. and papers relating to school life and friends, in particular George Beresford
• U. Sussex Library, letters to L. C. Dunsterville
• U. Sussex Library, letters to Harry Lewin
• U. Sussex Library, corresp. and literary MSS kept by Miss Parker, his secretary
• University of Essex Library, Colchester, letters to Samuel Levi Bensusan
• Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, corresp. with F. N. Finney
• BFINA , home footage
• BL Sound and Moving Image Catalogue , recorded talks; performance recordings; documentary recording
• Bourne and Shepherd (Simla), photograph, 1887–8, U. Sussex , Kipling papers; repro. in Kipling, Early verse (1986), frontispiece
• J. Collier, oils, 1891, Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex
• Violet, duchess of Rutland, lithograph, 1891, NPG
• D. Strang, etching, 1898 (after W. Strang, 1898), NPG
• W. Strang, pencil drawing, 1898, NPG
• P. Burne-Jones, oils, 1899, NPG ; copy?, Johannesburg Art Gallery [see illus.]
• W. Nicholson, coloured woodcut, 1899, NPG
• W. Cushing Loring, pencil drawing, 1901, Athenaeum, London
• W. Strang, oils, 1913, Magd. Cam.
• photograph, 1913, repro. in The Bookman [NY], 38 (1913)
• E. Kapp, chalk drawing, 1914, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham
• H. Manuel, photograph, 1915
• W. Stoneman, photograph, 1924, NPG
• F. Dodd, chalk drawing, 1929, FM Cam.
• F. Dodd, charcoal drawing, 1929, FM Cam.
• photograph, 1930, repro. in War writings and poems , Outward bound edition , vol. 34, frontispiece
• W. Rothenstein, chalk drawing, 1932, NPG ; related drawing, FM Cam.
• W. Stoneman, photograph, 1934, NPG
• G. Bingguely-Lejeune, bronze cast of bust, 1936–1937, NPG
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, repro. in The poets' corner (1904)
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, AM Oxf.
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, Harvard TC
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, NYPL
• M. Beerbohm, caricature, oils ( Edwardian Parade ), U. Texas
• H. Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing, NPG
• A. P. F. Ritchie, cigarette card, NPG
• Spy [L. Ward], lithograph, NPG ; repro. in VF (7 June 1894)
• photograph, NPG

Wealth at Death

£121,470 4 s . 0 d .: probate, 6 April 1936, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition .

• Baldwin, Stanley, first Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1867–1947), prime minister
• Dunsterville, Lionel Charles (1865–1946), army officer and literary prototype
• Jones, Sir Edward Coley Burne-, first baronet (1833–1898), painter
• Kipling, Alice (1837–1910)
• Macdonald sisters (act. 1837–1925)
• Poynter, Sir Edward John, first baronet (1836–1919), painter and arts administrator

More on this topic

• Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard, (30 Dec. 1865–18 Jan. 1936), author; Rector, University of St Andrews, 1922–25 in Who Was Who

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish history
• Churchill Archive
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Archives
• BBC, In Our Time
• English Heritage Blue Plaque
• Westminster Abbey, poets' corner
• British Pathe
• Royal Academy

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date: 18 September 2024

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Rudyard Kipling

A short biography of rudyard kipling, rudyard kipling’s writing style, major themes, imperialism, masculinity and manhood, war and soldiers’ problems.

He criticized the Government for not providing facilities to those who sacrifice their lives for the country. These young people who were dying for the English Empire were not well-treated and Rudyard Kipling wrote about it in Tommy, Danny Deever, Boots and Gentlemen Rankers.

Works Of Rudyard Kipling

• Rudyard Kipling
• 1 Portraits
• 3.1 English labels

English labels

• Gallery pages about people of India

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