Rudyard Kipling - (1865-1936)

His Life:

As a six-year-old, he and his three-year-old sister were sent to England and cared for by a woman named Mrs. Holloway. The poor treatment and neglect he experienced until he was rescued at the age of 12 may have influenced his writing, in particular his sympathy with children.

After a spell at a boarding school, the United Services College, which provided the setting for his schoolboy stories of Stalky & Co., Kipling returned to India, to Lahore (in modern-day Pakistan) where his parents were then working, in 1881. He began working as a newspaper editor for a local edition and continued tentative steps into the world of poetry; his first professional sales were in 1883. By the mid-1880s, he was travelling around India as a correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer. His fiction sales also began to bloom, and he published six short books in 1888. One short story dating from this time is "The Man Who Would Be King."

His first novel, The Light that Failed, was published in 1890. The most famous of his poems of this time is probably "The Ballad of East and West" (which begins "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet").

In 1892, he married Caroline Balestier. Her brother Wolcott had been Kipling's friend, but had died of typhoid fever the previous year. While the couple were on honeymoon, Kipling's bank failed, and cashing in their travel tickets only allowed the couple to return as far as Vermont (where most of the Balestier family lived). Rudyard and his new bride lived in the United States for the next four years.

In Brattleboro, Vermont, they built themselves a big, interesting dark-green shingled house. The house still stands (on Kipling Road). In the beginning, he was very happy there, his father visited him, and during this time, he turned his hand to writing for children, and he published the works for which he is most remembered today, The Jungle Book and its sequel The Second Jungle Book in 1894 and 1895. A golf enthusiast, Kipling also invented the game of "snow golf" while playing in Vermont during the winter months.

In 1899, Kipling published his novel Stalky & Co. These school stories include one of the best accounts in literature of a Latin lesson. The character Beetle is based on Kipling's own school days as a short-sighted intellectual boy.

In 1898, Kipling began travelling to Africa, for winter vacations almost every year. In Africa, Kipling met and befriended Cecil Rhodes, and began collecting material for another of his children's classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, Kim, first saw the light of day the previous year.

Soon after Kipling had received the Nobel Prize(1907), his output of fiction and poems began to decline.

In 1902 he sought the seclusion of a lovely seventeenth century house called Bateman's near Burwash, nearby in Sussex, where he spent his remaining years.

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.

Between the years 1922 and 1925 he was a rector at the University of St. Andrews. Kipling died on January 18, 1936 in London, and was buried in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey.

His Books:

This famous short story by Rudyard Kipling tells the story of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, two ex-soldiers in India when it was under British rule. They decide that the country is too small for them, so they head off to Kafiristan in order to become Kings in their own right. Kipling is seen as a character that was there at the beginning, and at the end.

Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man that I am, Gunga Din!
(from 'Gunga Din', 1890)

Collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1894. The Second Jungle Book, published in 1895, contains stories linked by poems. The stories tell mostly of Mowgli, an Indian boy who is raised by wolves from infancy and who learns self-sufficiency and wisdom from the jungle animals. The book describes the social life of the wolf pack and, more fancifully, the justice and natural order of life in the jungle. Among the animals whose tales are related in the work are Akela the wolf; Baloo the brown bear; Shere Khan, the boastful Bengal tiger who is Mowgli's enemy; Kaa the python; Bagheera the panther; and Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose.

Novel of maritime adventure by Rudyard Kipling, the action of the novel takes place on the We're Here, a small fishing boat whose crew members rescue the protagonist, Harvey Cheyne, when he is washed overboard from an ocean liner. The captain refuses to take him back to port and instead makes Harvey a member of the crew. The rest of the story focuses on Harvey's personal transformation from the arrogant, pampered son of a millionaire to an admirable young man who has learned the values of hard work, simple living, and self-reliance.

First published in 1899, Stalky and Co. is a collection of school stories based on Kipling's own experiences at the United Services College. Kipling himself appears as the central character called Beetle and through him shows how school is a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. Stalky & Co. repeatedly outwit their elders and peers in creative and innovative ways - but the language is pure gold. The book is chocked full of delightful gems of British schoolboy slang, from giglamps to brollies - and the teachers' vocabulary is spectacular.

When his father, a soldier stationed in India, dies suddenly, young Kimball O'Hara is left to fend for himself on the streets of Lahore. A proper English lad, Kim is plunged into an exotic and unfamiliar world of crowded bazaars and noisy markets, gilded temples, sahibs and fakirs, beggars, whirling dervishes, soldiers, and spies. Forced to live hand-to-mouth, Kim must rely on his cunning and wit to survive.But his life takes a curious twist when he meets a holy man, a lama, who is about to embark on a very mysterious quest: a pilgrimage that will take him across the vast continent, across mighty rivers and up the majestic Himalayas. He wants Kim to accompany him.But where will the journey lead? For Kim, all roads lead to adventure!

A collection of children's animal fables linked by poems by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1902. Most of the stories include far-fetched descriptions of how certain animals developed their peculiar physical characteristics, as in "How the Leopard Got His Spots, "How the Camel Got His Hump." "The Butterfly That Stamped," and "How the Alphabet Was Made." He began inventing these stories in his American wife's hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, to amuse his eldest daughter--and they have served ever since as a source of laughter for children everywhere.