Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, novelist, and poet whose 50-year writing career produced multiple foundational documents of late-19th and early-20th-century English literature — particularly his 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature (the first English-language author to win the prize and the youngest recipient at age 41 at the time). He was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, British India (modern Mumbai), into an English colonial family. His father John Lockwood Kipling was an art teacher at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay, and his mother Alice Macdonald was the daughter of a Methodist minister.

His early childhood in Bombay (1865–1871) produced his lifelong fluency in Hindi and Marathi alongside English. The 1871 separation from his parents — when he and his sister Trix were sent to England for boarding-school education and lived for six years with the abusive Holloway family in Southsea, England (1871–1877) — shaped his subsequent autobiographical writing, particularly his 1888 short story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep."

His 1882 return to India at age 16 produced his early journalism career as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore (1882–1887) and the Pioneer in Allahabad (1887–1889). His early Indian short stories — collected in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) — launched his early-career commercial breakthrough.

His 1894 publication of The Jungle Book — a collection of Mowgli stories set in the central Indian forest — produced his children's-fiction commercial breakthrough. The 1895 sequel The Second Jungle Book and the subsequent 1894 poem "If—," 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden," and 1901 novel Kim further established his late-Victorian-era literary reputation. The 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature recognized his "observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration." His later biographical legacy has been complicated by 20th-century critical reassessment of his colonial-era racial-and-imperial views — particularly the 1899 imperial-justification poem "The White Man's Burden." He died on January 18, 1936, at age 70, in London, of a perforated duodenal ulcer.

His name Rudyard derives from a Staffordshire, England place-name (Lake Rudyard, near where Kipling's parents met and courted). Rudyard has been a rare but enduring boys' name across the late 19th and 20th centuries.