A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: English short-story writer, novelist and poet, who celebrated the heroism of British colonial soldiers in India and Burma, best known for his works 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), If— (1910) and Ulster 1912 (1912); 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). Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), British India, son of Alice née MacDonald (1837-1910) and John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911). Alice was a vivacious woman and Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. Ruddy, as Kipling was affectionally called, was brought up by an ayah, who taught him Hidustani as his first language. At the age of six he was taken to England by his parents and left for five years at a foster home at Southsea. Kipling, who was not accustomed to traditional English beatings, expressed later his feeling of the treatment in the short story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', in the novel The light that failed (1891), and in his autobiography (1937). Kipling's writings at the age of thirteen were influenced by the pre-Raphaelites - and he also had family connections to them: two of his mother's sisters were married into the pre-Raphaelite community. He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works speak to a versatile and luminous narrative gift. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 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. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected. 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. He enjoyed early success with his poems but soon became known as a masterful short story writer for his portrayals of the people, history, and culture of his times. Through his works Kipling often focused on the British Empire and her soldiers though today that perspective of imperialism and ‘taming the natives’ has limited his popularity. He was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works, in particular Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1890), collections of short stories with roughly and affectionately drawn soldier portraits. His Barrack Room Ballads and other verses (1892) were written for, as much as about, the common soldier. In 1894 appeared his Jungle Book, which became a children's classic all over the world. Kim (1901), the story of Kimball O'Hara and his adventures in the Himalayas, is perhaps his most felicitous work. Other works include The Second Jungle Book (1895), The Seven Seas (1896), Captains Courageous (1897), The Day's Work (1898), Just So Stories (1902), Trafficks and Discoveries (1904), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits and Credits (1926), Thy Servant a Dog (1930), and Limits and Renewals (1932). During the First World War Kipling wrote some propaganda books. His collected poems appeared in 1933. In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Devon, England, an expensive institution that specialized in training for entry into military academies. His poor eyesight and mediocre results as a student ended hopes about military career. 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, in 1899. In 1882 Kipling traveled back to Lahore, India to live with his parents. It was a happy homecoming and his ayah was overjoyed to see him too. There he worked as a journalist in Lahore for Civil and Military Gazette (1882-87) and an assistant editor and overseas correspondent in Allahabad for Pioneer (1887-89). He had suffered frail health as a child and his penchant for working ten or more hours a day may have led to a later nervous breakdown. The stories written during his last two years in India were collected in The phantom rickshaw. It that included the famous story "The Man Who Would Be a King." In the story a white trader, Daniel Dravot sets himself up as a god and king in Kafristan, but a woman discovers that he is a human and betrays him. His companion, Peachey Carnehan, manages to escape to tell the tale, but Dravot is killed. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly. On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, traveling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then traveled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; on to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. In the course of this journey he met with Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim. On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the "thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones. The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place and Henry James gave the bride away. The newlyweds settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan. However, when the couple arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking their loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child—and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. It was in this cottage, Bliss Cottage, that their first child, Josephine, was born on the night of December 29, 1892. It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Book came to Kipling. With Josephine's arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—ten acres on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie's brother Beatty Balestier, and built their own house. Kipling named the house "Naulakha" in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelled correctly. From his early years in Lahore (1882-1887), Kipling had become enthused by the Mughal architecture especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually became an inspiration for the title of his novel as well as the house. His reclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy "sane clean life", made Kipling both inventive and prolific. In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories (The Day's Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack Room Ballads, first published individually for the most part in 1890, which contains his poems Mandalay and Gunga Din was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of imaginative writing—and enjoyed too corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them. In early 1898 Kipling and his family traveled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. The period 1898–1910 was a crucial one in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Kipling was dissatisfied with the life in Vermont, and after the death of his daughter, Josephine, Kipling took his family back to England and settled in Burwash, Sussex. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free State. In 1901 appeared Kim, widely considered Kipling's best novel. The story, set in India, depicted adventures of an orphaned son of a sergeant in an Irish regiment. Embittered by the Great War Kipling sought solitude in the Sussex downs and in 1902 he and Carrie found the house ‘Bateman’s’ in Burwash, which he purchased and lived in for the rest of his life. In 1915 during World War I Kipling visited the Western Front as reporter and wrote France at War. The Finges of the Feet (1915) was followed by Sea Warfare (1916). Soon after Kipling had received the Nobel Prize, his output of fiction and poems began to decline. His son John died at the age of eighteen while fighting with the Irish Guards in the Battle of Loos which he wrote about in The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). Between the years 1922 and 1925 he was a rector at the University of St. Andrews. In 1926 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, which only Scott, Meredith, and Hardy had been awarded before him. Rudyard Kipling died of a hemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936 in London, and his ashes are interred in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, England near to T. S. Eliot. Today his study and the gardens at ‘The Elm’ are preserved by the Rottingdean Preservation Society, and Bateman’s is held by the National Trust. The Kipling Society was founded in 1927. |
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