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Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer who received the Nobel Prize in 1907 for his gifts as a poet, novelist, and writer of short stories. Kipling was born in Bombay, India, and spent the first few years of his life there. He considered this the most charmed period in his life, a period that ended when, at the age of six, his parents sent him to England to begin his schooling. He remained in school from 1871 until 1882. With no funds to go to university, he returned to India, where he worked as a journalist and began his literary career. Throughout the rest of his life, which he spent in India, America, and eventually back in England, Kipling produced a vast body of writing. Perhaps most beloved, even to this day, are his works for children, and especially The Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902). Though he lived well into the twentieth century, Kipling’s worldview was deeply influenced by conservative values from the nineteenth century. Since his death in 1936, his literary reputation has diminished due to his disturbing and old-fashioned social and political views, chief among them being his support for the imperial “civilizing mission,” a set of ideas the British Empire used to justify colonization.

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