About Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling is an iconic figure of literature whose novels, short stories, and poems have cast a long and lasting impression on our literary canon. He was born in 1865 in British India to colonial British parents, and most of his work reflects his experiences in India.

Famous Books

• The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales – This is a collection of short stories with a speculative bent. Kipling tales in this collection involve the ghosts of a spurned lover haunting the man who jilted her, a man who hears the sound of billiards in a house that was a billiards house ten years ago, and the strange tale of white men who were revered as gods until one of them bleeds and reveals their humanity and the natives turn on them.
• The Jungle Book – This collection of stories introduces Mowgli, the man-cub, adopted son of Raksha, mentee of Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther, and nemesis of Shere Khan the Tiger. Among other tales, this book, Kipling’s most famous work, tells the adventures of a feral boy whom wolves raised, his adventures in the jungle, and his alienation from neither a full member of a pack of wolves nor a community of people.
• The Second Jungle Book – This collection continues ‘The Jungle Book’ and features other Mowgli tales before and after Shere Khan’s death. Like the first book, it also features stories unrelated to Mowgli. It continues the theme of fables that teach a moral or offer a fantastic origin tale for natural phenomena.
• Just So Stories – A collection of origin tales told to Kipling’s Best Beloved including how the elephant got its trunk (by having it pulled by a crocodile), and how the kangaroo got its powerful hind legs (by being chased around by a dingo dog).
• Kim – Set between the Second and Third Afghan War, ‘Kim’ is an adventure spy novel featuring Kimball O’Hara, an orphan, and his friend, a lama, on his personal enlightenment journey. Kim begins life as a vagabond in the streets of Lahore, but his life changes when he befriends a Tibetan lama looking to free himself from the Wheel of Things. On the lama’s advice, he is enrolled in an English school and trained to be a spy for the English engaged in a conflict with Russia in Central Asia. Kim’s spying activities and the lama’s enlightenment enmesh in wild espionage adventure.
• Captain Courageous – Fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne falls off a transatlantic steamship and is rescued from drowning by a fishing boat. Harvey is the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, and he tries to impress his rescuers with his father’s wealth and induce them to return him to port immediately. Dan Troop, the fisherman who rescues him, will not comply and takes him along his fishing trip, enlisting him as crew with his son. Through his experience aboard the boat, Harvey develops character and skills, taking on responsibilities aboard the fishing vessel.

Early Life

At five, he and his sister were sent away to England for school and to get an English upbringing, as was the custom of British nationals who lived and had children abroad. They were sent to live with the Holloways, a family that boarded other children like him. Kipling recalled the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of the mistress of the house, calling the house ‘House of Desolation.’

He was enrolled in United Services College in Devon, a prep school for boys bound for the military. Although the experience was challenging, he made great friends there, and it inspired his schoolboy tales in ‘Stalky & Co‘.

At the end of his school days, Kipling was not admitted to Oxford on a scholarship, and his family could not afford to pay for it. His father arranged for him to get a job in India as an assistant editor for the Civil and Military Gazette, a local paper in Lahore. During this period of his return to India, he also worked as an editor for the Pioneer, a sister paper in Allahabad. Kipling’s productivity at this time was remarkable. He was responsible for a newspaper released six days a week all year and was also able to publish short stories that appeared in the gazette. In eight months, from 1886 to 1887, he published 39 short stories and released six collections of short stories by 1888.

Later Life

The years of his life in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States inspired most of his work. In the United States, he befriended such notable figures as Henry James, Mark Twain, and Theodore Roosevelt. His travel notes on Japan and other places in Southeast Asia he visited contain valuable impressions of those places. He became friends with Cecil Rhodes, whom he visited regularly in South Africa, and other prominent British politicians in South Africa. Kipling wrote commentaries on British involvement in South Africa and poetry supporting the British cause in the Second Boer War.

Kipling’s first daughter, Josephine, was born in the United States, and it was also in the house that Kipling began to work on his most famous work, ‘The Jungle Book‘. The 1890s (and a couple of years after) were Rudyard Kipling’s most rewarding literary years when he published his most impactful work. These include ‘The Light That Failed‘ (1890), ‘The Jungle Book‘ (1894), ‘The Second Jungle Book‘ (1895), a collection of verse called ‘The Seven Seas‘ (1896), ‘Captain Courageous’ (1897), ‘Kim‘ (1901), and ‘Just So Stories‘ (1902). It is likely on the strength of his work during this period that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, at 41, the youngest ever to receive that award.

Rudyard Kipling and his wife Catherine had three children: Josephine, Elsie, and John. Of the three, only Elsie survived into adulthood. Josephine died of pneumonia in 1899, and John was killed in action in 1915 during WWI.

In his politics, Kipling was fiercely imperialist and conservative, and this has done much to tarnish his literary image over the years. In his work, such as the poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, he expresses a firm belief in colonialism as an effort to bring civilization to primitives, a duty of the superior European culture. He also was a staunch defender of the British Empire, supporting his native land in the Boer War, and was an anti-German propagandist for the British government in WWI. He opposed Irish nationalism, Bolshevism, and the Labour Party in England.

Death and Legacy

Rudyard Kipling died on 18th January 1936 after surgery failed to correct a hemorrhage in his small intestine. He was 70.

Rudyard Kipling was remarkable for his gift for language, imaginative power, innovation in the art of the short story, curiosity and observation, perceptiveness in grasping, and clarity in transmitting ideas.

His poetry is vigorous and decidedly upbeat. Kipling favors rhymes and metric rhythms, preferring a traditional poetic style and clear expression over free verse and opaque poetic construction. His most famous poem, ‘If—,’ embodies these hallmarks of Kipling’s verse.

Kipling could parse and convey lofty and profound ideas in evocative style and accessible language, and his sense of narrative adventure was exemplary. His children’s stories are just as popular, if not more well-known than his works for adults. ‘The Jungle Book’ is his most famous work, and ‘Kim’, his most renowned novel, features an adolescent British spy.

Part of the decline in popularity Kipling’s works faced after WWI owed to his imperialist views. As expressed more boldly (and one wonders if with a touch of irony) in his poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, Kipling’s often celebrated the virtues of colonial rule, portraying it as a civilizing force that brought order and progress to the world. His unabashed patriotism and belief in the superiority of British values permeated many of his works, a representation of prejudice rapidly going out of fashion even while he was still alive. The result of this is that for all his literary brilliance and the volume of his oeuvre, Kipling’s literary status is much reduced nowadays.

Literature by Rudyard Kipling

Explore literature by Rudyard Kipling below, created by the team at Book Analysis.