by Rudyard Kipling

Bom in Bombay, India, of British parents, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) spent the first five years of his life with his parents in India before going to England for a proper British education. At seventeen, he returned to India and from 1882 to 1889 pursued a journalistic career in the northern reaches of the country. While working for a British newspaper, Kipling also began to write short works of fiction that were well received. Eventually he departed India for the West, married an American woman, and lived out most of the rest of his life in celebrity in England. The nostalgic novel Kim was written while Kipling was recovering from a terrible bout of influenza that nearly killed him and did in fact kill his beloved seven-year-old daughter. Despite its sometimes dark ruminations upon race relations and the charge that it conveys an image of righteous British colonialism...