Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was an English writer born in India, the author of The Jungle Book, Kim, the Just So Stories and the poem If—. Enormously popular in his lifetime, he became in 1907 the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work, closely bound up with the British Empire, is both admired for its storytelling and debated for its imperialism.
Genres
poetry, novels and stories
Works
Barrack-Room Ballads, The Second Jungle Book, Rewards and Fairies
Bombay and the House of Desolation
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865; his father, John Lockwood Kipling, taught at the art school there. He spent a happy early childhood speaking Hindustani with his servants, until at five he and his sister were sent to England and boarded with a family in Southsea.
He spent nearly six miserable years there, bullied by the woman who kept the house, which he later called the House of Desolation. He told the story in the tale Baa Baa, Black Sheep. He was then sent to a school in Devon for future army officers, which he described in Stalky & Co.
A journalist in Lahore
In 1882, at sixteen, Kipling returned to India and worked for seven years as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and then the Pioneer in Allahabad. He wrote verses and short stories about British officials, soldiers and Indians, collected in Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales from the Hills.
Arriving in London in 1889, he became famous almost at once. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), poems written in the voice of common soldiers, were recited across the country.
The Jungle Book
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend, and settled near her family in Brattleboro, Vermont. There he wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book, with Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther and the tiger Shere Khan.
After a family quarrel he returned to England in 1896. The death of his daughter Josephine in 1899 was a terrible blow. He published Kim (1901), the story of an Irish orphan and a Tibetan lama travelling across India, often considered his masterpiece, and the Just So Stories (1902), written for his children.
Fame and sorrow
Kipling settled at Bateman's, a seventeenth-century house in Sussex, and published Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, which contains If—. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize. He supported the war effort in 1914, and his only son, John, was reported missing at the battle of Loos in 1915, aged eighteen.
After the war he worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission and chose the inscription used on war memorials. He died in London on 18 January 1936 and his ashes were placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. George Orwell called him a jingo imperialist and also a good bad poet whose phrases had entered the language.
Anecdotes
Known unto God
After the First World War Kipling chose the words carved on the graves of unidentified soldiers in Commonwealth war cemeteries: 'A Soldier of the Great War / Known unto God'. His own son's body was not identified during his lifetime; a grave was attributed to John Kipling in 1992.
The swastika removed
Kipling's books long carried on their covers an ancient Indian symbol of good luck, the swastika, together with an elephant. When the Nazi party adopted the symbol, Kipling had it removed from his books in the 1930s.
Frequently asked questions
What are Rudyard Kipling's most famous works?
The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902), Captains Courageous, The Man Who Would Be King, and poems such as If—, Gunga Din and Mandalay.
Did Kipling win the Nobel Prize?
Yes, in 1907, at forty-one. He was the first English-language writer to receive it and remains its youngest winner in literature.
Where was Kipling born?
In Bombay, now Mumbai, in India, on 30 December 1865.