Demonstrating what is considered an exceptional understanding of his young audience and their taste for adventure, drama, and high emotion, Kipling fashioned his
Jungle Book tales around protagonists who often display cunning skills, stalwart courage, and wise leadership.
Writers for Children contributor William Blackburn asserted: "Kipling is one of the most influential creators of modern literature for children. Unlike many of his models and contemporaries, he brought a true seriousness to the production of children's literature, a seriousness reflected in his painstaking research and craftsmanship, in the richness and sophistication of his language, and most remarkably, in the seriousness of his subject matter itself."
Kipling was born in Bombay, India, at the end of the year 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was principal of the Jeejeebyhoy School of Art. The architect and artist had come to the colony, Charles Cantalupo related in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "to encourage, support, and restore native Indian art against the incursions of British business interests." He meant to try, Cantalupo continued, "to preserve, at least in part, and to copy styles of art and architecture which, representing a rich and continuous tradition of thousands of years, were suddenly threatened with extinction." The author's mother, Alice Macdonald, had connections with important members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in British arts and letters through her sister's marriage to the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
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