The Author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) A poet, novelist and short-story writer, Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father worked as an art teacher before becoming Director of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was able to learn the Hindu language and observe Indian life closely. When he was six, he was sent to England to attend school, as was the custom among the British in India. This experience was dramatically different from the earlier happy years. Kipling described his lonely childhood in Britain in his moving story Baa-baa, Black Sheep . At the age of seventeen, he returned to India and began to work for The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. He always recognised that it was his training as a journalist that made him a writer. Many of his early lyrics and tales were published in that newspaper. In 1888, he published his first volume of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, which was followed by two further collections: Soldiers Three (1888, enlarged in 1899) and Wee Willie Winkie (1890). This long series of tales established him as a master of short fiction. Between 1887 and 1889, Kipling travelled through Asia and America and then went to England, where he wrote his first long story: The Light That Failed (1891), an autobiographical novel. The travel sketches that he had written for various newspapers were later published under the title From Sea to Sea (1899). While Kipling s first novel was not successful, he gained a great reputation with the collection of poems, the Barrack Room Ballads (1892), written in soldiers slang. In 1892, Kipling married an American, Caroline Balestier, and lived in Vermont (USA) for the next four years. Here he wrote another collection of stories, Many Inventions (1893), and The Jungle Books (189495), a modern version of the ancient genre of the beast fable. Based on the myth of the child abandoned in the jungle and raised by animals, the children s stories of Mowgli made Kipling world famous. In 1896, Kipling returned to England. He continued working as a 30