Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Born: December 30, 1865

Bombay, India

Died: January 18, 1936 (aged 70)

Middlesex Hospital, London, England [1]

Occupation: Short story writer, novelist, poet, Journalist

Nationality: British

Genres: Short story, novel, children’s literature, poetry, travel literature

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was an English author and poet, born in India, and best known today for his children’s books, including The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906); his novel, Kim (1901); his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and “If—” (1910); and his many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) and the collections Life’s Handicap (1891), The Day’s Work (1898), and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). He is regarded as a major “innovator in the art of the short story”;[2] his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature; and his best work speaks to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.[3][4]

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[2] The author Henry James famously said of him: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”[2] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and he remains its youngest-ever recipient.[5] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected.[6]

However, later in life Kipling also came to be seen (in George Orwell’s words) as a “prophet of British imperialism.”[7] Many saw prejudice and militarism in his works,[8][9] and the resulting controversy about him continued for much of the 20th century.[10][11] According to critic Douglas Kerr: “He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.”[12]

/18/1936 Kipling’s “Permanent Contradictions”

On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although a Nobel winner and one of England’s most popular writers, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but cartooned as a pith-helmeted jingoist. Recent biographers and critics, like Orwell and Borges and Edmund Wilson before them, find a more complex man and writer, perhaps one of “permanent contradictions.”

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SELECTED WORKS BY THIS AUTHOR

Collected Stories

anthology, fiction, children

Kim

children

Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse

anthology, fiction, children

Something of Myself

autobiography

The Jungle Book

children

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Name: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Birth Date: December 30, 1865

Death Date: January 18, 1936

Place of Birth: Bombay, India

Place of Death: Burwash, England

Nationality: British

Gender: Male

Occupations: writer, poet

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Joseph Rudyard Kipling

The British poet and story writer Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was one of the first masters of the short story in English and the first to use Cockney dialect in serious poetry.

Rudyard Kipling’s early stories and poems about life in colonial India made him a great favorite with English readers. His support of English imperialism at first contributed to this popularity but caused a reaction against him in the 20th century. Today he is best known for his Jungle Books and Kim, a story of India.

Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, where his father was professor of architectural sculpture in the School of Art. In 1871 he was sent to England for his education. In 1878 Rudyard entered the United Services College at “Westward Ho!,” a boarding school in Devon. There young “Gigger” endured bullying and harsh discipline but also enjoyed the close friendships, practical jokes, and merry pranks he later recorded in Stalky & Co. (1899). Kipling’s closest friend at Westward Ho!, George Beresford, described him as a short, but “cheery, capering, podgy, little fellow” with a thick pair of spectacles over “a broad smile.” His eyes were brilliant blue, and over them his heavy black eyebrows moved up and down as he talked. Another close friend was the headmaster, “Crom” Price, who encouraged Kipling’s literary ambitions by having him edit the school paper and praising the poems which he wrote for it. When Kipling sent some of these to India, his father had them privately printed as Schoolboy Lyrics (1881), Kipling’s first published work.

In 1882 Kipling rejoined his parents in Lahore and became a subeditor for the Civil and Military Gazette. In 1887 he moved to the Allahabad Pioneer, a better paper which gave him greater liberty in his writing. The result was a flood of satiric verses, published as Departmental Ditties in 1886, and over 70 short stories published in 1888 in seven paperback volumes. In style, the stories showed the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, and Guy de Maupassant; but the subjects were Kipling’s own: Anglo-Indian society, which he readily criticized with an acid pen, and the life of the common British soldier and the Indian native, which he portrayed accurately and sympathetically.

Fame in England and America

In 1889 Kipling took a long voyage through China, Japan, and the United States. When he reached London, he found that his stories had preceded him and established him as a brilliant new author. He was readily accepted into the circle of leading writers, including William Ernest Henley, Thomas Hardy, George Saintsbury, and Andrew Lang. For Henley’s Scots Observer, he wrote a number of stories and some of his best-remembered poems: “A Ballad of East and West,” “Mandalay,” and “The English Flag.” He also introduced English readers to a “new genre” of serious poems in Cockney dialect: “Danny Deever,” “Tommy,” “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” and “Gunga Din.” Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed (1891), was unsuccessful. But when his stories were collected as Life’s Handicap (1891) and poems as Barrackroom Ballads (1892), Kipling replaced Tennyson as the most popular English author.

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier.

They settled on the Balestier estate near Brattleboro, Vt., and began four of the happiest years of Kipling’s life, during which he wrote some of his best work–Many Inventions (1893), perhaps his best volume of short stories; The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), two books of animal fables which attract readers of all ages by illustrating the larger truths of life; The Seven Seas (1896), a new collection of poems in experimental rhythms; and Captains Courageous (1897), a novel-length sea story. These works not only assured Kipling’s lasting fame as a serious writer but also made him a rich man.

His Imperialism

In 1897 the Kiplings settled in Rottingdean, a village on the British coast near Brighton. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Boer War in 1899 turned Kipling’s attention to colonial affairs. He began to publish a number of solemn poems in standard English in the London Times. The most famous of these, “Recessional” (July 17, 1897), issued a warning to Englishmen to consider their accomplishments in the Diamond Jubilee year of Queen Victoria’s reign with humility and awe rather than pride and arrogance. The equally well-known “White Man’s Burden” (February 4, 1899) clearly expressed the attitudes toward empire implicit in the stories in The Day’s Work (1898) and A Fleet in Being (1898). He referred to less highly developed peoples as “lesser breeds” and considered order, discipline, sacrifice, and humility to be the essential qualities of colonial rulers. These views have been denounced as racist, elitist, and jingoistic. But for Kipling, the term “white man” indicated citizens of the more highly developed nations, whose duty it was to spread law, literacy, and morality throughout the world.

During the Boer War, Kipling spent several months in South Africa, where he raised funds for soldiers’ relief and worked on an army newspaper, the Friend. In 1901 Kipling published Kim, the last and most charming of his portrayals of Indian life. But anti-imperialist reaction following the end of the Boer War caused a decline in Kipling’s popularity. When he published The Five Nations, a book of South African verse, in 1903, he was attacked in parodies, caricatures, and serious protests as the opponent of a growing spirit of peace and democratic equality. Kipling retired to “Bateman’s,” a house near Burwash, a secluded village in Essex.

Later Works

Kipling now turned from the wide empire as subject to England itself. In 1902 he published Just So Stories for Little Children. He also issued two books of stories of England’s past, intended, like the Jungle Books, for young readers but suitable for adults as well: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). But his most significant work was a number of volumes of short stories written in a new style: Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and Reactions (1904), A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). These later stories treat more complex, subtle, and somber subjects in a style more compressed, allusive, and elliptical. Consequently, these stories have never been as popular as his earlier work. But modern critics, in reevaluating Kipling, have found a greater power and depth that make them his best work.

In 1907 Kipling became the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He died on January 18, 1936, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His autobiography, Something of Myself, was published posthumously in 1937.

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