Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, in 1865 and spent the first five years of his life there. Although he travelled to England in 1871, his first language was Hindi and he spoke English as a foreign tongue in these early years. When he grew up, Kipling returned to India as a journalist. He also lived in the United States, where he went with his American-born wife, and back in England. However, he quickly became successful for his writing, especially his children’s stories, ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘Just So’. Kipling also wrote poetry that inspired a nation and short stories, as well as non-fiction pieces in support of the British Empire. His popularity brought him financial success and, in 1907, the Nobel Prize for Literature, at the age of forty-one. (Kipling remains the youngest person ever to be awarded the Prize.) Opinions of Kipling have swung from one extreme to the other. From the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was immensely popular, to the end of the British Empire, after the Second World War, when this most patriotic of writers was seen as a champion of evil. He died in 1936, however, and did not live to see this.