Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a professor of Indian art and architecture. After being educated in England, Kipling returned to India in 1882, where he worked for the next seven years as a reporter. During this time his short stories about life in British-ruled India (published in 1888 as Plain Tales from the Hills) won him a literary reputation there, and when Kipling came back to Britain in 1889 he was rapidly accepted on the London literary scene as something of a young genius. By the following year he had published a novel, The Light That Failed (1890), along with further collections of short stories and several books of poetry that focused on the British colonial experience in India. Forever linking Kipling’s name with the British Empire, his poems (e.g., “Gunga Din,” 1882) and stories (e.g., “The Man Who Would Be King,” 1888) are highly original in their often sympathetic portrayals of both Indians and the common British soldiers serving in India. During the 1890s, Kipling’s series of children’s stories featuring Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, was published as the two Jungle Books (1894 and 1895).
