Rudyard Kipling Born: Empire's Poet and Storyteller

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay. He spoke Hindustani before he spoke English. His ayah sang him to sleep in the language, and his first memories were of the sounds, colors, and smells of India. He was sent to England for school at six and found it a form of exile he never fully recovered from. He was placed in a foster home in Southsea where the woman who cared for him was cruel in ways he later described in the story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep." He escaped into reading and eventually into Westward Ho!, a school that gave him the camaraderie and structure his childhood had lacked. He returned to India at seventeen as a journalist in Lahore, and the stories he wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette drew on the world he observed with a precision that made readers feel they were seeing India through a camera lens rather than through the filter of imperial romanticism. The Jungle Book, published in 1894, became one of the most beloved children's books in the world. Kim, published in 1901, is considered the finest English-language novel about India. He was the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1907, at forty-one, still the youngest recipient in the prize's history. His son John, whom Kipling had helped enlist despite his poor eyesight, was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at eighteen. Kipling spent years searching for the grave. He never found it. He wrote the epitaphs inscribed on war cemeteries across France: "Their name liveth for evermore." And: "A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God." He died on January 18, 1936, in London.