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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British writer who received the Nobel Prize in 1907 for his gifts as a poet, novelist, and writer of short stories. Kipling was born in Bombay, India, and spent the first few years of his life there. His parents moved from England to India shortly before Kipling was born because his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was hired to be a principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay. This period of his life ended when, at the age of six, his parents sent him to England to begin his schooling.
Kipling remained in school from 1871 until 1882. With no funds to go to university, he returned to India, where he worked as a journalist and began his literary career. Throughout the rest of his life, which he spent in India, America, and eventually back in England, Kipling produced a vast body of writing including his famous poems “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and “If—” (1910). While in London, Kipling met New York-born Caroline Starr Balestier, was the sister of Kipling’s friend and sometimes co-author, Wolcott Balestier. The pair bonded after Wolcott’s sudden death from typhoid in 1891 and were married shortly after. Kipling's most beloved and most famous texts are his works for children, and especially The Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902). Both The Jungle Book and Just So Stories are collections of short stories about different jungle animals, likely inspired by his experiences in India .
Though he lived well into the twentieth century, Kipling’s worldview was deeply influenced by conservative values from the nineteenth century. Since his death in 1936, his literary reputation has diminished due to his disturbing and old-fashioned social and political views, chief among them being his support for the imperial “civilizing mission,” a set of ideas the British Empire used to justify colonization.
