RUDYARD KIPLING was born in Bombay, India where he had a happy childhood until age five when he was sent to England to stay with a foster family; there he was miserable. When he was twelve, he went to the United Services College, an experience he later drew on in the popular Stalky & Co(1899). At age sixteen, in 1882 Kipling returned to India and worked as a journalist. His first volume of poetry, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886, and between 1887 and 1889 he published six volumes of short stories set in India. The poems and stories established a reputation such that he returned to England in 1889 he was hailed as a successor to Dickens. His first novel The Light That Failed, was published in 1890. In 1892 he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and they established a home in Vermont. There Kipling wrote Captain's Courageous (1897), and most of Kim (1901), as well as much of the are The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), all of which were highly successful. The Kiplings remained in the United States, where two of their children were born, until 1896 when a dispute with Caroline’s relatives prompted their returned to England. On a return trip to the United States in 1899 the Kiplings eldest daughter Josephine died, an event which deeply affected Kipling, who was so gravely ill at the time that he was not told of her death until he recovered. It was Josephine for whom he had first devised the tales that became the Just So Stories published in book form in 1902. In 1902 Kipling moved to Bateman’s, a country house in Sussex, in part to escape the travails of his fame, where he lived until the end of his life, writing and traveling. After his eighteen-year-old son John was killed in 1915 on a World War I battlefield he continued to write but his output was slower and achieved less acclaim. Kipling was a prolific writer, producing poetry, short stories, novels, sketches, journalism, opinion pieces and historical works. In 1907 he became first writer in the English language to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His autobiography Something of Myself was published in 1937 after his death. Kipling lauded British imperialism and the heroism of the British soldier. While his once popular political and social views are now repellent to many readers most speakers of the English language are familiar with one or two of his poems and stories if only through film versions and his works for children remain popular.
Biographical information on Kipling can be found in any standard reference work. As part of The New Readers Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling, the Kipling Society provides an excellent bibliographical essay on his biographies by Lisa Lewis. To find the article scroll down to General Articles. Kipling biographies are complicated by the author's fierce love of privacy. He destroyed many of his own papers and his wife and daughter destroyed many more.
Works consulted:
Birkenhead, F.W. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Random House, 1978.Lord Birkenhead wrote this biography under contract to Elsie Bambridge, Kipling's daughter, who rejected it after reading the first draft. He later updated it and it was published after his death and the death of Mrs. Bambridge. Only Birkenhead and Carrington (see below) had access to the Kipling archives before Mrs. Bambridge destroyed even more documents than her mother and father had.
Carrington, C.C. The Life of Rudyard Kipling. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1955.
The biography authorized by Kipling's daughter, Elsie Bambridge.
Kipling, Rudyard.Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1937.
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