Literature: 1907

Kipling, Rudyard, pronounced RUHD yuhrd (1865-1936), was a leading English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He is best known for his stories about India during the late 1800's, when India was a British colony. Kipling wrote more than 300 short stories, which illustrate a wide variety of narrative techniques. He also wrote children's stories that became popular worldwide. In 1907, Kipling was the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature.

Childhood: Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on Dec. 30, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, had come to Bombay after being appointed to a teaching post at a Bombay school of art. Indian servants took care of Rudyard and taught him the Hindi language of India.

When Kipling was 5 years old, his parents brought him to Southsea, England, near Portsmouth. It was the custom of English parents living in India to remove their children from the heat and deadly diseases of the colony by sending their children to school in England. In Southsea, Kipling was boarded with paid foster parents. He felt he had been deserted during his five unhappy years there. Kipling later recalled this period in a bitter short story, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" (1888).

At the age of 12, Kipling was enrolled at the United Services College, a school established to educate inexpensively the sons of Army officers. Kipling, an eager reader, was made editor of the school journal. He developed several lifelong friendships at the school. Stalky & Co. (1899), a collection of short stories, is a fictional record of his life there. The stories emphasize adolescent brutality and practical joking but constitute a lively record of life in an English public school.

Young journalist: Limited family finances prevented Kipling from going to a university. In 1882, he returned to India instead and joined the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper in the northwestern city of Lahore. He learned much about life in the region by reporting on local events. By 1886, his feature articles and stories had many readers. The newspaper also printed some of his poems, later collected in Departmental Ditties (1886) and enlarged in later editions.

In 1887, Kipling joined the staff of the Pioneer, a newspaper in Allahabad. He wrote articles based on his travels in northern India. Many were later collected in From Sea to Sea (1899).

Early literary success: Kipling's first book of fiction, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), consists of 40 stories, 32 of them originally written for the Civil and Military Gazette. Stories for the Pioneer soon were collected in six paperback books in the Indian Railway Library series. These books, sold in railroad stations, were popular with travelers and spread Kipling's fame outside India.

Kipling returned to England in 1889. His Indian Railway Library stories were reprinted in the collections Soldiers Three and Wee Willie Winkie in 1890. Kipling's first novel, The Light That Failed, was also published in 1890. The novel about an artist going blind received mixed reviews, but Kipling by this time was the most talked about writer in both England and the United States. Life's Handicap (1891) is another collection of short stories. These stories include "Without Benefit of Clergy," a powerful study of a doomed love affair between an Englishman and a young Indian woman.

Kipling's popularity grew tremendously with his Barrack-Room Ballads, which were published individually in periodicals in the early 1890's and collected in book form in 1892. Many of the Ballads are written in the Cockney dialect. They include such famous poems as "Danny Deever," "Fuzzy Wuzzy," "Gunga Din," and "Mandalay."

Kipling in America: Soon after his return to England, Kipling became friends with the American literary agent Wolcott Balestier. Shortly before his death in 1891, Balestier collaborated on Kipling's second novel, The Naulahka (1892). In January 1892, Kipling married Balestier's sister, Carrie, in London.

The Kiplings moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in the summer of 1892. They lived there in a rented cottage for one year. This was a period of hard work for Kipling. He published Many Inventions (1893), a collection that includes the fine tale about a sea monster, "A Matter of Fact." Kipling also wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), children's stories that gained a wide international audience. These stories describe the adventures of Mowgli, an Indian child who gets lost in the jungle and is brought up by a family of wolves. While in the United States, Kipling also visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, to conduct research on fishing fleets for his sea novel, Captains Courageous (1897).

Later career: Kipling returned to England in 1896. He wrote poems for the London Times that made bold political judgments and prophesied the direction of international events. For example, "Recessional" warned the British of complacency in the face of rising militarism in Germany. Kipling also urged the need for a slow transfer of power from colonial governments to native populations in parts of the British Empire.

Kipling returned to the subject of India in his finest novel, Kim (1900). The story tells of an Irish orphan who adopts early and completely to Indian ways. The novel became a classic because of its rich rendering of the multiple cultures of India. It offers portraits of unforgettable characters--especially native Indians.

Another book of children's stories, the Just So Stories, appeared in 1902. It gives humorous explanations of such questions as how the leopard got its spots and how the elephant got its trunk. Kipling reviewed English history for children in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910).

Kipling's later works reveal a darkened view of the world. His daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia in 1899, and his son, John, died in 1915 in the Battle of Loos during World War I. In addition, Kipling's concerns about his own health colored the fiction of his later years. He suffered from a bleeding ulcer for years before it was finally diagnosed in 1933. Kipling's last three volumes of short stories, A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932), stress the realities of pain and death. He died on Jan. 18, 1936. An unfinished autobiography, Something of Myself, was published in 1937, after his death.

Contributor: Harold Orel, Ph.D., University Professor Emeritus, University of Kansas.