Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, where his father taught at an art school. His first years were happy ones, spent with Indian servants who told him stories and spoke to him in Hindustani. Then, when he was five, his parents took him and his younger sister to England and left them, without explanation, as paying boarders with a family in Southsea. The woman who ran the house was harsh and cruel to him, and he spent nearly six years there, an experience he later wrote about in the story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.”

At sixteen he returned to India and became a journalist on a newspaper in Lahore. He worked long hours in the heat, and in his spare time wrote stories and verses about British soldiers and officials and the Indians around them. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and other little books made him famous, and when he arrived in London in 1889, at twenty-three, he became a literary sensation almost overnight.

He married an American, Caroline Balestier, and they built a house near Brattleboro, Vermont, which they called Naulakha. There, in the snowy New England winters, he wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book, the stories of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, with Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. After a family quarrel the Kiplings left America, and in 1899, on a visit to New York, their eldest child, Josephine, died of pneumonia, at six. The Just So Stories (1902), which explain how the elephant got its trunk and the camel its hump, had first been told to her.

He wrote Kim (1901), a great novel of India, and the poem “If—,” which became one of the most quoted in English. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and at forty-one he is still among its youngest winners.

Kipling was also a fierce defender of the British Empire, and some of his writing celebrates it in ways many readers now find hard to accept. His only son, John, was killed in the First World War, after Kipling had helped him get a commission despite poor eyesight. Kipling never got over it. He died in 1936.