Rudyard Kipling

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An Indian-born English journalist, novelist, and travel writer, best-known for short stories, poetry, and children's books, RK won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He never felt like a native in England although he spent most of his life there, lived in other countries as well, and never saw India after his mid-twenties. He was convinced of the moral mission of the British empire, seeing devoted heroism in its workers but pettiness and bureaucracy in its administration. He writes of India as an insider and his Indian writings were his best loved in England. His increasingly conservative politics seeped into his writing later in his career and lost him some of the immense, immediate public interest that his early work had garnered.

Milestones

30 December 1865
Joseph Rudyard Kipling , British short-story writer, poet and journalist, was born in Bombay in British India. He was the elder of two surviving children.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
under Macdonald sisters
1881
Schoolboy Lyrics, a volume of poetry, was technically RK 's first published work. Printed for private circulation by his parents, much to his later embarrassment, it contains brilliant exercises in the styles of canonical poets.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Stewart, James McGregor. Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue. Yeats, A. W.Editor , Dalhousie University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1959.
4-7
May 1894
RK published the first of his children's books to become and remain well-known: The Jungle Book.
Stewart, James McGregor. Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue. Yeats, A. W.Editor , Dalhousie University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1959.
123
December 1900-October 1901
RK 's most enduring and widely-read longer fiction, the short novel Kim, was serialised in McClure's Magazine.
Stewart, James McGregor. Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue. Yeats, A. W.Editor , Dalhousie University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1959.
212
18 January 1936
RK , short-story writer, poet and journalist, died of a haemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer at the Middlesex Hospital in London.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
February 1937
RK 's brief autobiography, Something of Myself, was posthumously published. It was reprinted the same month.
Stewart, James McGregor. Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue. Yeats, A. W.Editor , Dalhousie University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1959.
454
Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. Macmillan, 1937.
prelims

Biography

Birth and Influences

30 December 1865
Joseph Rudyard Kipling , British short-story writer, poet and journalist, was born in Bombay in British India. He was the elder of two surviving children.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
under Macdonald sisters

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