Rudyard KIPLING

Nobel Prize 1907

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were Alice Kipling, born MacDonald, and John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and teacher at the Jejeebhoy Scool of Art and Industry of Bombay. His parents has just arrived in India when Rudyard was born, having met in England, near Lake Rudyard, whose name they gave to their son. At the age of six, Rudyard left for England to follow an English education. He was accompanied by his younger sister Trix, who was three years old. Over the next six years, they were both to live with Captian Holloway and his wife. In his autobiography, Kipling evokes this period with horror, asking himself, not without irony, whether the mix of cruelty and neglect that he received at the hands of Mrs Holloway did not precipitate the blossoming of his literary talents. However the two children did have family in England : at Christmas they spent a happy month with their aunt Georgina and her husband, the painter Edward Burne-Jones in London. In the spring of 1887, Alice Kipling came back to England from India and took her children out of the hands of Captain Holloway.

In January 1867, Kipling entered the United Services College in Devon, a new school that specialised in the preparation of a military career. At the beginning he experienced difficulties, but he ended up making lasting friendships and these years furnished him with the raw material for a collection of   schoolboy stories, Stalky and Co, published some years later. He fell in love with Florence Garrad, a fellow boarder of Trix's. She would be the inspiration for   Maisie, the heroine of Kipling's first novel, The Light that Failed (1891). Towards the end of his stay in school, it became clear that he did not possess the necessary academic prowess to obtain a scholarship to go to Oxford University. His parents did not have the financial resources to send him there either.  

In 1882, Kipling returned to Lahore (India) where his father was the head of an art school (Mayo College of Art) and curator of the Museum of Lahore. He worked at the Civil and Military Gazette . In 1886 he published his first collection of poems Departmental Ditties . That same year, the new editor Kay Robinson, let him enjoy a greater artistic freedom and suggested that he compose short stories for the newspaper.

In the meantime, during the summer of 1883, Kipling went for the first time to Shimla, a famous mountain town that was a summer holiday spot for the British. The writer would spend the summer holidays of 1885-1888 in Shimla and the town features regularly in the stories he published in the Gazette . He then published tales, stories, and poems, including Mother Maturin , his first version of Kim , where he expressed his love of Lewis Caroll.

Kipling published around 40 short stories in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were collected in Plain Tales from the Hills , his first collection of prose published in Calcutta in January 1888. He had just turned 22. In November, he was transferred to Allahabad, to the offices of The Pioneer , the grandfather of the Gazette . Kipling still wrote at the same frenzied pace, publishing six collections of stories in the following year : Soldiers Three , The Story of the Gadsbys , In Black and White , Under the Deodars , The Phantom Rickshaw and Wee Willy Winkie . In addition, as a correspondant in the Western zone of Rajasthan, he wrote a number of letters which were collected later under the title of Letter of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel .

At the beginning of 1889, following a dispute, The Pioneer decdied they would no longer accept Kipling's contributions. He thus left India, and travelled through Rangoon, Singapour, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. On his return, Kipling settled in Liverpool. In the period when he published his first novel The Light that Goes Out , he began to suffer from depression. At this time he met Wolcott Balestier, an American writer, who was also working as a literary agent. Together they wrote a novel called The Naulahka . In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked upon another journey that led him from South Africa to Australia, then to New Zealand, and then to Lahore. But he abandoned his plans to spend Christmas with his family upon hearing the news of the death of Wolcott Balestier. He returned immediately to London and proposed to Carrie Balestier, Wolcott's sister. She accepted. Life's Handicap , an anthology of short stories came out in London.

The young couple travelled extensively, honeymooning in Vermont and in Japan. Discovering that their bank had gone bankrupt, they returned to Vermont where Josephine, their first daughter was born. Kipling began the stories of Mowgli which became The Jungle Book . The Kipling couple bought a house there that they called Naulakha. He wrote much there, thanks to the high quality of life. He produced The Day's Work , Captains Courageous , and series of poems which included The Seven Seas . Their second daughter Elise was born.

In 1896 the Kiplings had to leave the United States. Rudyard's alcoholic brother-in-law attacked him physically, and the English were not well regarded in the States. The family moved to Devon.

By this point Kipling was a well known writer. The Kipling family lived in Sussex from 1897 to 1901.

Kipling would then travel to South Africa where prominent politicians becomes close friends. He supported the cause of the English during the Boer War. In 1899 Josephine caught pneumonia following a trip to the United States and she died.

Kipling continued to collect his short stories for children which would be published under the title of Just So Stories , and then Kim would appear in 1901. These books were followed by Puck of Pook's Hill ( 1906) and The Return of Puck (1910) which evoke with nostalgia childhood paradises.   His son John died during the First World War in 1915 - Kipling would go on to write a detailed history of the regiment in which he served.

Kipling was the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

He continued to write until the beginning of the 1930's but his works were met with less success.

He died on the 18th of January 1936 in London.