Kipling, RUDYARD, story-teller, was born at Bombay, 30th December 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E., principal of the School of Art at Lahore in the Punjab, himself the author of Beast and Man in India (1891). Rudyard was educated at Westward Ho and elsewhere in England, but returned in 1880 to India, where he began to contribute verses, tales, and articles to Indian journals, making his literary debut at Lahore in 1884 (in Echoes). But it was by his Departmental Ditties (1st ed., Calcutta, 1886), Plain Tales from the Hills (Calcutta, 1888), and Soldiers Three (Allahabad, 1889), that he became well known in England, and sprang at once into the front rank of popular favourites. The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie, and The Phantom Rickshaw, followed close on the heels of Soldiers Three, and like it formed part of an Indian Railway Library published at Allahabad. The City of Dreadful Night illustrates certain aspects of Calcutta. More ambitions, though hardly so successful, was the longer tale, The Light that Failed (1891). The Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), in verse more remarkable for vigour of diction and swing of rhythm than for the refinements of poetic form, were amongst his most brilliant successes; and Naulekha (1892), a longer tale, was produced in conjunction with Mr Balestier. Life's Handicap (1891) and Many Inventions (1893) are other collections of short tales and sketches, not exclusively Indian in subject; and the magazines compete for contributions from his pen. In 1892-96 he lived mainly in the United States.
From the first his sketches of the glories and disgraces and views of Tommy Atkins abroad, and of the more mysterious and unfamiliar life of the natives, were felt equally to 'palpitate with actuality.' He seems from an intimate and first-hand knowledge of the minds and hearts alike of natives and soldiers to render their own ideas in their very words; and he deals directly and simply with the elemental passions of human nature, with love and hate, with shame and fear, with joy and misery. The interlocutors, both high and low, are frequently far from refined, reverent, or sinless; and it has been objected to his tales of Anglo-Indian life that the tone is both flippant and cynical, and that too many of both his men and women seem to be 'playing at tennis with the seventh commandment,' as he himself words it. But unquestionably he commands true realistic power, and in his smallest masterpieces, pathos and humour, the ghastly and the comic, are combined with the vraisemblance of an everyday experience. His inimitable Jungle Book (1894) was followed by a Second Jungle Book (1895). There were more Soldier Stories in 1896, and the poem called Seven Seas. Captains Courageous (1897) was a tale of fishing life on the banks of Newfoundland. The Day's Work (1898) was a collection of stories.