Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and teacher at the city’s new school of art, and Alice MacDonald. At five he was sent to England to board with a family in Southsea, years he remembered with bitterness, and later to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon. At sixteen he returned to India as a journalist in Lahore, where many of the stories gathered in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) first appeared.

In 1889 he left for London and quickly became a sensation. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) gave the common soldier a voice in music-hall rhythms, while the years after his marriage to Caroline Balestier, spent largely in Vermont, produced The Jungle Book (1894) and its sequel. Kim (1901), his richest novel, follows an Irish orphan and a Tibetan lama along the roads of British India; the Just So Stories (1902) grew from tales told to his own children. His command of the short story, compressed, allusive and densely textured, was widely admired, even as poems such as “The White Man’s Burden” bound his name to the imperial project.

In 1907, aged forty-one, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize, and he remains the youngest literature laureate. He declined both a knighthood and the poet laureateship. The death of his only son, John, at the Battle of Loos in 1915 shadowed his later work. From 1902 he lived at Bateman’s, a seventeenth-century house in Burwash, Sussex; he died in London in January 1936, and his ashes lie in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.