Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [1]
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Kim
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-192-8 ISBN-10: 1-59308-192-8
eISBN : 978-1-411-43248-2
LC Control Number 2003109510
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Printed in the United States of America
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Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to a prominent couple. In 1871 Rudyard and his sister, Alice, were sent to England to live under the foster care of the Holloway family in Southsea. During six years there, the young boy was the subject of frequent physical and emotional abuse, an experience that left him deeply scarred. In 1878, at age twelve, he enrolled at the United Services College in Devon, where he remained for four years. At school he discovered his love of literature and began to write, taking Edgar Allan Poe as his primary model. His first work, Schoolboy Lyrics, was published in 1881.
Kipling returned to India in 1882 and began working at a Lahore newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette, followed by a three-year stint at another paper, the Pioneer, in Allahabad. At a time when British expansionism was near its zenith, Kipling began writing stories about Western colonization. His volume of poems Departmental Ditties was published in 1886, and in 1888 several collections of Indian stories, including Plain Tales from the Hills and his six-volume Indian Railway Library series, appeared, bringing him immense popularity. Returning to England in 1889 by way of Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and America, Kipling attained literary celebrity, though he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1890. After recovering he published a novel, The Light That Failed, and a collection of stories, Life’s Handicap.
In 1892 Kipling married an American, Caroline Balestier, the sister of his friend and agent Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a second novel, The Naulahka, published that same year. Barrack-Room Ballads also appeared in 1892. The Kiplings settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, where their daughters, Josephine and Elsie, were born. There Kipling wrote Many Inventions (1893) and the two Jungle Books (1894 and 1895), and began working on Kim. After a violent argument with his brother-in-law, Kipling returned to England in 1896 and settled on the Sussex coast in 1897, the year his son, John, was born and Kipling’s novel Captains Courageous was published. Two years later Kipling became seriously ill with pneumonia, and his daughter Josephine died, yet he brought out Stalky & Co. and a travel book, From Sea to Sea.
Kim was published in 1901, and the following year Kipling moved to Burwash, Sussex, where he produced his children’s books Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). In 1907 he became the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1915 Kipling’s son, John, was killed in battle during World War I. Haunted by this event and in declining health, Kipling nonetheless continued to write.
George Orwell described Kipling as “the prophet of British Imperialism,” and his imperialist sentiments were reflected in such poems as “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). These convictions strengthened as he grew older, putting him at an increasing distance from the political and moral realities of the changing world. Later in life Kipling became highly critical of the Liberal government that won control of the British parliament, finding fault with its pacifist policies during World War I and actively supporting an increase in military spending for national defense. He did not live to see the extinction of his imperialist visions. On January 18, 1936, Rudyard Kipling died, shortly before World War II and the subsequent decline of the British Empire. His autobiography, Something of Myself, was published posthumously.
The World of Rudyard Kipling and Kim
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