Kipling, Joseph Rudyard

Kipling, Joseph Rudyard (1865-1936), British author and poet, b. Bombay, India.

Rudyard Kipling was named after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire. That was where his parents first met.

His father was the headmaster of a school in Bombay but Rudyard was sent to school in England.

At the age of seventeen, he went back to India to write for a newspaper. Three books of poems and short stories made him famous and he returned to England in 1889.

Afterwards he spent most of his life there writing stories and poetry. His most famous books for children are The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Stalky & Co (1899), Just So Stories (1902), Puck Of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910).

Two of his other children's books, Captains Courageous (1897) and Kim (1901) have been made into movies and so has The Jungle Book.

Today Kipling's best-known poem is If.

Kipling was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1895 but turned it down.

In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

See Harry Ricketts Rudyard Kipling