Kipling, Rudyard

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936), born in Bombay, son of John Lockwood Kipling, author and illustrator of Beast and Man in India (1891). He was brought to England in 1871, where he spent five years at boarding school separated from his parents, a period recalled with bitterness in his short story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ (1888) and his novel The Light that Failed (1890). From 1878 to 1882 he attended the United Services College, Westward Ho!, later depicted in his schoolboy tales Stalky & Co. (1899). From 1882 to 1889 he worked as a journalist in India; many of his early poems and stories were later collected under various titles, which include Departmental Ditties (1886), Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Soldiers Three (1890), and Wee Willie Winkie (1890). In 1889 he came to London, where he achieved instant literary celebrity, aided by Henley's publication in his Scots Observer of many of the poems (‘Danny Deever’, ‘Mandalay’, etc.) later collected as Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, sister of his American agent Charles Wolcott Balestier with whom he had written The Naulahka (1892). Widely regarded as unofficial poet laureate, he was in 1907 the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize.

Kipling's early tales of the Raj were praised for their cynical realism, but his growing reputation as the poet of Empire cut both ways. His poem ‘Recessional’, written for Jubilee Day 1897, was acclaimed for catching the mood of the moment, but the mood changed. His verse has added many phrases to the language (including, significantly, ‘the white man's burden’), but he was increasingly accused of vulgarity and jingoism in aesthetic and anti-imperialist circles. His most uncontroversial and durable achievements are perhaps his tales for children (principally The Jungle Book, 1894; Just So Stories, 1902; Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906; and Rewards and Fairies, 1910), and his picaresque novel of India, Kim, is generally considered his masterpiece. His autobiographical fragment Something of Myself was published in 1937.