Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was a British author and poet. Born in Bombay, in British India, he is best known for his works of fiction The Jungle Book (1894) (a collection of stories which includes Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), Kim (1901), many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and If— (1910).

He was a contemporary of J. M. Barrie, and the two have much in common, especially the creation of works featuring "feral" boys (Mowgli and Peter Pan) that have been repeatedly adapted in other media (such as animated and live-action films) and remain popular more than a century later. They had noteworthy differences, as well. Kipling was a world traveler; Barrie rarely ventured far from the United Kingdom. Each was popular as a novelist, but their greatest successes were in other forms: Kipling in short stories and verse, Barrie in stage plays. Each lost a beloved son or foster son to World War I.

Kipling was arguably the more lauded. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined. (Barrie was granted and accepted a baronetcy, a lesser honour.)

Childhood and early life
Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), in India which was part of the British Empire then, to Alice and (John) Lockwood Kipling. His father was a sculptor and pottery designer, the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly-founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. The couple had met in courtship two years previously at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England, and had been so taken by its beauty that they now named their firstborn after it.

Kipling considered himself Anglo-Indian, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. When he was five years old, he and his three-year-old sister were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth)—to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living in India. They lived with the Captain and Mrs. Holloway for the next six years, which Kipling found abusive; he later credited his early literary skill to the attention he paid to lying – and keeping his lies consistent – to avoid his guardians' wrath. The two children spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana and her husband artist Edward Burne-Jones, at their house in London, which Kipling was to call "a paradise which I verily believe saved me."

In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. published many years later. During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a fellow boarder with his sister at Southsea (to which she had returned).

He lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him, so his father obtained a job for him in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette.

In the late 1880s, he published several collections of verse and short stories. Leaving his newspaper job with a severance payment, and selling the rights to his published works, he embarked on a journey to London, the long way. He traveled through Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan to San Francisco. From there he went to Portland, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Yellowstone National Park, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago, Beaver PA, Niagara, Toronto, Washington DC, New York, and Boston. (He met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence.) Kipling then crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool and finally reached London.

Career as a writer
In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by various magazine editors. In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light that Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka. In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier's sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately returned to London.

On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London. Writer Henry James gave the bride away. When Kipling's bank failed, the couple rented a cottage on a farm near her family's estate in Vermont, where they lived simply and contentedly. It was in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling. As their family grew, they built a house. In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories, the novel Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas.



The Kiplings loved life in Vermont and might have lived out their lives there, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of family discord—that hastily ended their time there. In the early 1890s, a power struggle between the UK and US in South America had led to ab anti-British sentiment. Combined with confrontation with his brother-in-law which eroded Kipling's privacy, the couple decided to leave America for Devon, England.

His son John was born in August 1897. He had also begun work on two poems, "Recessional" (1897) and "The White Man's Burden" (1899) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.

In early 1898 Kipling and his family began taking winter holidays in South Africa, where Kipling became involved with political leaders, during this key period in the region's history. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry and articles in support of Britain's cause in the Boer War, and helped start a newspaper for British troops in the Orange Free State.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Kipling published Kim and another of his most-enduring children's classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. He published two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, the latter of which contained "If—", his most famous and popular poem. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first to an English-language author in the awards' 7-year history.

At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets which enthusiastically supported the UK's war aims. But his only son John died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which Kipling wrote "If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied". His son's death inspired his poem, "My Boy Jack", and the incident became the basis for the play of the same name. Kipling had helped get a commission in the Irish Guards, despite his initially having been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight, and exerted great influence to have his son accepted for officer training at the age of only 17.

Partly in response to this tragedy, Kipling joined the Imperial War Graves Commission, the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase "Known unto God" for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen.

From 1922–1925, Kipling served as Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland.

Death
Kipling died of perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936, two days before George V, at the age of 70. (His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.") His ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, where many distinguished literary people are buried or commemorated.