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Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936)
 Kipling,
Rudyard was born in Bombay, India. Educated in England, Kipling
returned to India in 1882 and worked as an editor on a Lahore
paper. His early poems were collected in Departmental Ditties
(1886), Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and other volumes. His
first short stories of Anglo-Indian life appeared in Plain Tales
from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888). In 1889 he
returned to London, where his novel The Light That Failed (1890)
appeared. Kipling's masterful stories and poems interpreted
India in all its heat, strife, and ennui. His romantic
imperialism and his characterization of the true Englishman as
brave, conscientious, and self-reliant did much to enhance his
popularity. These views are reflected in such well-known poems
as “The White Man's Burden,” “Loot,” “Mandalay,” “Gunga Din,”
and Recessional (1897).
In London in 1892, he married Caroline Balestier, an American,
and lived in Vermont for four years. There he wrote children's
stories, The Jungle Book (1894) and Second Jungle Book (1895),
Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), and Captains Courageous
(1897). Returning to England in 1900, he lived in Sussex, the
setting of Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). Other works include
Stalky and Co. (1899) and his famous poem “If” (1910). England's
first Nobel Prize winner in literature (1907), he is buried in
Westminster Abbey.
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