KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865-1936), British author, was born in Bombay on Dec. 3o, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), an artist of considerable ability, was from 1875 to 1893 curator of the Lahore museum in India. His mother was Miss Alice Macdonald of Birmingham, two of whose sisters were married respectively to Sir E. Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter. He was educated at the United Services College, West ward Ho, North Devon, which is the scene of his story Stalky and Co. On his return to India he became at the age of 17 sub editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. In 1886, in his 21st year, he published Departmental Ditties, a volume of light verse chiefly satirical, only in two or three poems giving promise of his authentic poetical note. In 1887 he published Plain Tales from the Hills, a collection mainly of the stories contributed to his own journal. During the next two years he brought out, in six slim paper-covered volumes of Wheeler's Railway Library (Alla habad), Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, the Phantom 'Rickshaw and Wee Willie Winkle, at a rupee apiece. These were in form and substance a continuation of the Plain Tales. This series of tales, all written before the author was 24, revealed a new master of fiction. They were unequal, as his books continued to be throughout ; the sketches of Anglo-Indian social life being generally inferior to the rest. The style was to some extent disfigured by jerkiness and mannered tricks. But Kipling possessed the supreme spell of the story-teller to entrance and transport. The freshness of the inven tion, the variety of character, the vigour of narrative, the raciness of dialogue, the magic of atmosphere, were alike remarkable. The soldier-stories, especially the exuberant vitality of the cycle which contains the immortal Mulvaney, established the author's fame throughout the world.
The new author's talent was quickly recognized in India, but it was not till the books reached England that his true rank was appreciated and proclaimed. Between 1887 and 1889 he travelled through India, China, Japan and America, finally arriving in Eng land to find himself already famous. His travel sketches, con
tributed to The Civil and Military Gazette and The Pioneer, were afterwards collected (the author's hand having been forced by un authorized publication) in the two volumes From Sea to Sea (1889). A further set of Indian tales, equal to the best, appeared in Macmillan's Magazine and were republished with others in Life's Handicap (1891). In The Light that Failed (1891, after appearing with a different ending in Lippincott's Magazine) Kip ling essayed his first long story (dramatized 1905), but with com parative unsuccess. In his subsequent work his delight in the dis play of descriptive and verbal technicalities grew on him. His polemic against "the sheltered life" and "little Englandism" be came more didactic. His terseness sometimes degenerated into abruptness and obscurity.
But in the meanwhile his genius became prominent in verse. Readers of the Plain Tales had been impressed by the snatches of poetry prefixed to them for mottoes, certain of them being sub scribed "Barrack Room Ballad." Kipling now contributed to the National Observer, then edited by W. E. Henley, a series of Bar rack Room Ballads. These vigorous verses in soldier slang, when published in a book in 1892, together with the fine ballad of "East and West" and other poems, won for their author a second fame, wider than he had attained as a story-teller. In this volume the Ballads of the "Bolivar" and of the "Clampherdown," introducing Kipling's poetry of the ocean and the engine-room, and "The Flag of England," finding a voice for the Imperial sentiment, which—largely under the influence of Kipling's own writings— had been rapidly gaining force in England, gave the key-note of much of his later verse. In 1898 Kipling paid the first of several visits to South Africa and became imbued with a type of Imperial ism that reacted on his literature, not altogether to its advantage. Before finally settling in England Kipling lived some years in America and married in 1892 Miss Caroline Starr Balestier, sister of the Wolcott Balestier to whom he dedicated Barrack Room Bal lads, and with whom in collaboration he wrote the Naulahka (1891), one of his less successful books.