KIPLING, Rudyard
British short-story writer and poet (1865-1936)
Kipling learned his craft working for English-language newspapers in India in the 1880s. He wrote reports, stories and poems about the British soldiers and administrators, their servants and the snake charmers, fortune-tellers and other characters of the towns they lived in. Later, during the Boer War, he worked as a correspondent in South Africa, where he was a friend of Cecil Rhodes. Under the circumstances, it would have been hard for him not to reflect the imperialist attitudes of his age, first sunny confidence and then the jingoistic panic which overtook it in late Victorian times. But he is a more rewarding writer than this suggests. His sympathies were always with subordinates -- with private soldiers rather than generals, servants rather than employers, children rather than adults. He wrote well about all three: his stories for and about children, in particular, are magnificent. Something like half of each collection - most books contain both stories and poems -- is nowadays hard to take, not least where he writes in baby-talk (as in the Just-So-Stories, O best-beloved) or uses funny spellings to evoke Cockney or Irish speech. But every archness is balanced by a gem of insight or sensitivity. In this, too, he was characteristic of his time.
KIM (1901) This episodic novel is the story of a British orphan brought up as a beggar in Lahore, who becomes first the disciple of a wandering Buddhist monk and then an agent of the British secret service. He travels throughout India, and Kipling uses his adventures as a framework for descriptions of everyday scenes and characters, of such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world'.
Kipling's collections include Barrack-room Ballads, The Seven Seas and The Years Between (verse), Soldiers Three (stories), and the mixed prose-and-verse collections Many Inventions, Traffics and Discoveries, A Diversity of Creatures and Captains Courageous, and his children's books include the Just So Stories, the Jungle Book, Puck of Pook's Hill and the public-school Stalky and Co. Something of Myself is a guarded autobiography.
READ ON
Plain Tales from the Hills
Debits and Credits
To his stories about colonial adults : Noël Coward, 'Short Stories' his short stories J.G. Farrell, The Siege at Krishnapur about the 1857 Indian 'Mutiny', match Kipling's insight into the heyday of the Raj. John Masters, Nightrunners of Bengal W. Somerset Maugham, Orientations many short stories deal with the English at large in the enpire Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet
To Kipling's stories about children : Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories
more :Tags Pathways Themes & Places