Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865.

His father, John Lockwood Kipling, had gone to India to teach at the Bombay School of Fine Arts and later became curator of the Lahore Museum. His mother, Alice Macdonald, was one of five sisters in a prominent British family.

When he was six, Kipling and his sister were taken to England to attend school.

There the two children spent five unhappy years living in a foster home. In 1878 Kipling went off to boarding school at the United Services College, an inexpensive and inferior school for children of the military and civil service. He was later to recount his school experiences in his novel Stalky & Co.

Young Kipling returned to India in 1882 and began a career as a journalist, working for the Indian newspaper of Lahore, Civil and Military Gazette. Over the next seven years...