Rudyard Kipling Contribution

Henry James once stated that “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius that I have ever known (lifestyle.iloveindia.com).” Henry James was not alone in his train of thought. By the end of the nineteenth century, Rudyard Kipling had become a household name in Great Britain and quickly gained popularity on a global scale, much to the annoyance of contemporaries such as H. G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1907, Kipling garnered worldwide renown as he became the first writer in the English language to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in 1865 when India was still part of the British Empire. Young Kipling was fascinated with India and its folklore and customs, which would later inspire many works set in a romanticized India. At the age of six, Kipling and his sister Alice were sent to England to further their education, as his parents feared the influence that Indian society would have on their children. While boarding with an abusive foster family in England for the next six years of his life, a period during which he was intensely miserable, Kipling began inventing companions in the form of anthropomorphic animals (Kipling, v). He was then enrolled, at the age of twelve, in the United Services College, an unruly paradise in which the highest goals of English education are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and beating (Britannica). Given his rather tumultuous and difficult childhood, it is no surprise that many of his works have a streak of cynical and brutal sentiments within them.

Once finished with his schooling, Kipling returned to British India, where his father got him a job as the assistant editor of the Civil and M...

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...ed his influence to get John into the military despite his initial rejection, Kipling felt personally responsible for his son’s demise and was crippled by the overwhelming guilt that overcame him.

Kipling’s own death in 1936 at the age of 70 was followed by a decline in the popularity of his works, largely due to changing views and the disintegration of the British Empire following the end of World War II. India itself was one of the first countries to break away from the British Empire and to secure its independence as a sovereign nation in 1947. However, with the progression of the twentieth century, Kipling’s works regained favor and earned him a place among the canon of British literary history. Today, Rudyard Kipling is highly regarded as one of the greatest British authors of all time, with his Jungle Book collections still being read and enjoyed to this day.