Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936)

This cartoon (dated 1900) shows the Boer general Piet Arnoldus Cronje (1835–1911) surrendering to British forces at Paardeberg on 27 February 1900. British statesman in South Africa Cecil Rhodes is pictured, and English author and poet Rudyard Kipling appears as a reporter with a typewriter.

The Indian-born writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. His satirical stories based on colonial society in India earned him recognition in England, although he is best remembered for his children's tales, particularly the classic animal adventures in the two Jungle Books (1894–95).

English writer, born in India. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), about Anglo-Indian society, contains the earliest of his masterly short stories. His books for children, including The Jungle Book (1894–95), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), and the picaresque novel Kim (1901), reveal his imaginative identification with the exotic. Poems such as ‘If–’, ‘Danny Deever’, and ‘Gunga Din’, express an empathy with common experience, which contributed to his great popularity, together with a vivid sense of ‘Englishness’ (sometimes belittled as a kind of chauvinistic imperialism). Kipling's work is increasingly valued for its complex characterization and subtle moral viewpoints. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Kipling was educated at the United Services College at Westward Ho, Devon, England, which provided the background for Stalky and Co (1899). He worked as a journalist in India 1882–89 and during these years wrote the stories which appeared in Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three (1890), and Wee Willie Winkie (1890). Returning to London in 1889 he published the novel The Light that Failed (1890) and the poetry Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). He lived largely in the USA 1892–99, where he produced the two Jungle Books and Captains Courageous (1897). Settling in Sussex, southeast England, he published Kim, usually regarded as his greatest work of fiction; the Just So Stories; Puck of Pook's Hill; and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Kipling's son was killed at Loos, and the achievements of his regiment were commemorated in The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). In 1926 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature; he received many other honours, including associate membership of the French Académie des Sciences et Politiques, and was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Other works include the Departmental Ditties (1886), light and topical satirical verse with an Anglo-Indian setting, and brilliant travel sketches which he sent back to the Pioneer newspaper while returning to England via China, Japan, and the USA. These, together with his earlier Indian reports, Letters of Marque, were collected as From Sea to Sea (1899). Accounts of his later travels, to Australia and New Zealand, to Canada and to Egypt, were collected as Letters of Travel (1920) to which his Brazilian Sketches were added in 1938.

He experimented with short stories, and published a collection, The Day's Work, in 1898. For light relief he produced his most sustained humorous work, Stalky and Co (1899), the ancestor of nearly all subsequent school stories. His verse of this period was collected as The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903), and Songs from Books (1912); a later volume, The Years Between, was added in 1919, and his Inclusive Verse was issued the same year; the Definitive Edition appeared in 1940. In Traffics and Discoveries (1904), stories of sailors predominated, with army stories inspired by the Boer War and the poignant supernatural fantasies of ‘They’ and ‘Wireless’. Actions and Reactions followed in 1909 with tales varying from science fiction and political allegory to English country life, and A Diversity of Creatures (1917), one of his finest collections, explored these themes further. He had meanwhile investigated English history in Puck of Pook's Hill and its sequel Rewards and Fairies, and with the outbreak of war in 1914 he wrote sketches with military and naval themes. Kipling's last two collections of stories, Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932), are the most mature and perhaps the most interesting he wrote. His unfinished autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), was written as an epilogue to the definitive edition of his works, The Sussex Edition (1937–39).