(30 DECEMBER І865 – l8 JANUARY 1936)

Rudyard Kipling

From the 1890s to the 1920s the most popular writer in the English-speaking world was Rudyard Kipling. In 1907 he received the first Nobel Prize in literature given to an author writing in the English language. He published hundreds of short stories and poems, four novels, and volumes of pamphlets, speeches, and journalism.

The author loved children and enjoyed their company. The roots of Kipling's alliance with children go back, to his own childhood.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born 30 December 1865 in Bombay, India. His father was an educated man, who had come to India to teach art in Bombay, where Kipling spent his early childhood. His first six years were idyllic and stimulating. He had two Indian servants of his own, and with them he spoke the vernacular Hindustani and he had to be reminded to speak English to his parents. Then everything changed. When Rudyard was three, Alice Kipling gave birth to a daughter, named after her mother but called Trix, and in 1870 she gave birth to a second son who died almost immediately. This event set the Kipling parents on a course of action quite common among colonial families though disastrous for their son and daughter.

To remove Rudyard and Trix from the Indian heat and diseases, they took them back to England and placed them in the care of hired foster parents whom they had found through a newspaper advertisement. Their six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter did not see them again for over five years. Kipling never forgot the vulnerability of children. In 1878 Kipling enrolled in the United Services College, where his juvenilia was printed in school papers.

In 1882 Kipling started the working life for which his family close friend Price and other masters at the college had tried to prepare him. He arrived in Bombay on 18 October 1882 and joined his family in Lahore. Rudyard Kipling owed his position of assistant editor to Price's and his father's connections to one of the paper's ("Civil and Military Gazette") owners; unfortunately, the difficulties of everyday life included the absence of refrigeration and electric fans and throughout his tenure in India, Kipling suffered from malaria and dysentery. Kipling nevertheless worked long hours writing articles, acting,as editor...

Kipling's literary career began in earnest in 1886 with the publication of, “Departmental Ditties and Other Verses”, a collection of light and satiric poems about Anglo-Indian careers and courtships. In 1888 appeared "Plain Tales from the Hills".

In 1892 appeared "Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses". His critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, his reputation made, his success assured — though Kipling never counted on any assurances "Up like a rocket, down like the sticks was his motto. Soon Kipling got acquainted with Wolcott Balestier, an American publisher's agent, who became Kipling's closest inend As the two friends collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka a Story of West and East (1892), Kipling fell in low with Wolcott's elder sister Caroline (Carrie) and on 18\ I January 1892 Kipling married her. They went to the United States and set up house-keeping at Bliss Cottage near Brattieboro, Vermont. There, on 29 December 1892, Josephine Kipling was born. Her sister Elsie was born on 2 February 1896 in a house the Kiplings had built and christened Naulahka.

Content with a home of his own, a wife, and children, Kipling enjoyed a richly productive literary period that saw the beginning of his career as a children's author, producing "The Jungle Book"(1894) (The best-known character in "The Jungle Book" is Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves); "The Second Jungle Book"(1895); "Captain Courageous"(1897); "Kim"(1901) and "Just So Stones: For Little Children"(l902).

In the 1920s Kipling became a friend of King George V. He received honorary doctorates from McGill University in Canada; the Universities of Durham, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh; and the Universities, Paris and Strasbourg. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, and in 1923 he became lord rector of Saint Andrew's University.

He died on 18 January 1936 of the stroke.

Rudyard Kipling was the most popular British author since Charles Dickens and the most read and recited poet since Alfred Tennyson.