Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India. He is best known for the children's story The Jungle Book (1894), the Indian spy novel Kim (1901), the poems "Gunga Din" (1892), "If— " (1895), and his many short stories.

Early travels

By the mid-1880s he was travelling around the subcontinent as a correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer. His fiction sales also began to bloom, and he published six short books of short stories in 1888. One short story dating from this time is "The Man Who Would Be King."

Related Topics:
1880s - Fiction - 1888 - The Man Who Would Be King

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The next year Kipling began a long journey back to England, going through Burma, China, Japan, and California before crossing the United States and the Atlantic Ocean and settling in London. His travel account From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel is based on newspaper articles he wrote at that time. From then on his fame grew rapidly, and he positioned himself as the literary voice most closely associated with the imperialist tempo of the time in the United Kingdom (and, indeed, the rest of the Western world and Japan). His first novel, The Light that Failed, was published in 1890. The most famous of his poems of this time is probably "The Ballad of East and West" (which begins "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet").

Related Topics:
England - Burma - China - Japan - California - United States - Atlantic Ocean - London - From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel - The Light that Failed - 1890

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