Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard

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English writer, born in India. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), about Anglo-Indian society, contains the earliest of his masterly short stories. His books for children, including The Jungle Book (1894–95), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), and the picaresque novel Kim (1901), reveal his imaginative identification with the exotic. Poems such as ‘If–’, ‘Danny Deever’, and ‘Gunga Din’, express an empathy with common experience, which contributed to his great popularity, together with a vivid sense of ‘Englishness’ (sometimes belittled as a kind of chauvinistic imperialism). Kipling's work is increasingly valued for its complex characterization and subtle moral viewpoints. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Kipling was educated at the United Services College at Westward Ho, Devon, England, which provided the background for Stalky and Co (1899). He worked as a journalist in India 1882–89 and during these years wrote the stories which appeared in Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three (1890), and Wee Willie Winkie (1890). Returning to London in 1889 he published the novel The Light that Failed (1890) and the poetry Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). He lived largely in the USA 1892–99, where he produced the two Jungle Books and Captains Courageous (1897). Settling in Sussex, southeast England, he published Kim, usually regarded as his greatest work of fiction; the Just So Stories; Puck of Pook's Hill; and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Kipling's son was killed at Loos, and the achievements of his regiment were commemorated in The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). In 1926 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature; he received many other honours, including associate membership of the French Académie des Sciences et Politiques, and was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

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