Birthday of the Day

Born in Bombay, India and 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, Kipling 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 was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Bibliography:

See his Something of Myself (1937); biographies by J. I. M. Stewart (1966) and James Harrison (1982); studies by J. M. S. Tompkins (2d ed. 1965), V. A. Shashane (1973), R. F. Moss (1982), and Philip Mallett, ed. (1989).

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