1865-1936 · English writer and poet born in India, author of The Jungle Book
About Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, schooled in England, and worked as a young journalist in Lahore and Allahabad before his stories and verse made him famous in London. He wrote The Jungle Book in 1892-94 while living at Naulakha, the house he built near Brattleboro, Vermont, after marrying the American Caroline Balestier. His other books include The Second Jungle Book (1895), Captains Courageous (1897), Kim (1901) and Just So Stories (1902), and in 1907 he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And--which is more--you’ll be a Man, my son!”
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
written c. 1895; published 1910 · Early 20th Century · Poetry
If— is a father's counsel to his son on what it takes to become a man, delivered as one long conditional sentence. Kipling printed it in Rewards and Fairies (1910), a book of linked stories for children in which poems sit between the tales; If— follows the story Brother Square-Toes.