Rudyard Kipling
1865–1936
Biography
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, in British India, and was sent to school in England as a boy. He returned to India as a young man to work as a newspaper reporter, and the experience of those years fed the fiction and verse that made him one of the most widely read writers in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century.
His best-known books include the two volumes of The Jungle Book, the novel Kim, and the Just So Stories, along with a large body of short fiction. His poems, among them "Mandalay", "Gunga Din" and "If—", became familiar well beyond literary circles. He is admired as a master of the short story, and his children's books remain widely read. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language writer to receive it, and at forty-one he was the youngest laureate the prize had yet honoured.
His reputation has moved with the times. Readers in his own day valued his vivid portraits of soldiers, Indian life and the imperial enterprise. Later critics have argued sharply over his support for empire and over the racial attitudes that run through some of his writing. Most now agree that he was a shrewd observer of how empire was lived by the people inside it. He turned down the poet laureateship and several offers of a knighthood, and his ashes rest in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Three of his books are on this site: Barrack-Room Ballads, verse written in the voices of ordinary British soldiers; The Jungle Book, animal stories set in the Indian forest; and Just So Stories, tales for children that explain how animals came by their features.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Barrack-Room Ballads
by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling's songs in the voice of the common British soldier, from Danny Deever, Tommy and Gunga Din to Mandalay and the Widow at Windsor, gave the army in India a voice that had not been heard in English verse before. This edition has the First Series of 1892 and the Second…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Just so stories
by Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is among Kipling's best known works. Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as…
Summary from Wikipedia: Just So Stories (CC BY-SA 4.0)The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Book is an 1894 collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Most…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Jungle Book (CC BY-SA 4.0)The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
by Rudyard Kipling
The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales, also known as The Phantom 'Rickshaw & other Eerie Tales, is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1888. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written; the Book Guide explains these words…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales (CC BY-SA 4.0)The Seven Seas
by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling's 1896 volume sings of the sea and the empire in A Song of the English, McAndrew's Hymn, The Mary Gloster, The Last Chantey and The Rhyme of the Three Sealers. Its Barrack-Room Ballads are left out here, as they have a book of their own. This book uses the racial and…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.