Rudyard Kipling Born: Empire's Poet and Storyteller
Rudyard Kipling was born in December 1865 in Bombay. He spoke Hindustani before he spoke English. He was sent to England for school at six and found it a form of exile he never fully recovered from. He went back to India as a journalist at seventeen and wrote the stories that made him famous. "The Jungle Book," "Kim," "The Man Who Would Be King." He was the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1907, at forty-one. His son John died at the Somme in 1915, eighteen years old, in a battle Kipling helped recruit him into. Kipling spent the rest of his life looking for the grave.
December 30, 1865
161 years ago
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