In 1883, Kipling returned to India and worked as a journalist. He published six volumes of short stories set in India, which he knew intimately and loved. His poetry collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) captured the zeitgeist vividly, conjuring up nationalistic urges. When Kipling married an American woman, Caroline Balestier, and settled down to live a respectable Puritan life in Brattleboro, Vermont, Willa Cather wrote that his future as an artist was endangered. “Ah, Mr. Kipling,” she mourned, matrimony “has shorn the wings of your freedom, and your freedom was your art.” Urging him to “go back to the East, flee out into the desert before it is too late,” she lamented, “Alas! There were so many men who could have married Mrs. Kipling, and there was only you who could write Soldiers Three.” Kipling had come to be regarded as the soldier’s author, because he had written so much from their point of view and had mastered their colorful slang. This in itself is a remarkable feat, considering that he had never participated in any military duty.
Though the jungle boy and the creatures who inhabit The Jungle Books were conceived in India during the author’s childhood, they were given birth in the unexotic setting of a small New England village: “It’s an uncivilized land (I still maintain it), but how the deuce has it wound itself around my heartstrings in the way it has?” After a family feud, the Kiplings returned to England, settling down in Sussex, which was to replace India as the setting for much of his later work.
In 1907 Kipling won the Nobel Prize in literature “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration which characterized his writings.” However, the bravado of his writing took a turn when his son went missing in action in World War I. This tragic loss led Kipling to change from being the bard of the Empire to becoming the poet of bitterness and guilt. His works published in the years after the death of both his children, Josephine and John, display deep suffering, emotional stress, breakdown, and recovery. He became obsessive about obtaining and destroying letters he had sent—to protect his private life before his death. Having seen the slow crumbling of the Empire, a disenchanted Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
For me, growing up in Turkey, reading The Jungle Books held no political overtones, just the mysterious and awesome world of the jungle, a respect for the wild, and a longing for adventure. It is ironic that Kipling created a “curry” of Indian culture and myth with the Western style of literature. In “Brushwood Boy,” (1898) one of my all-time favorite stories, he uses several Indian themes against the unemotional banality of life in the upper classes, distilling common Sanskrit myths into a Victorian costume drama.
Only after T. S. Eliot described Kipling’s poems as “great verse that sometimes unintentionally changes into poetry” did Kipling’s work receive a reassessment from other critics that revived his literary reputation to the merited level. The prejudices against the worldview of colonialism should not diminish our appreciation of this brilliant writer’s artistic achievements.
—Alev Lytle Croutier
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Other Works by Rudyard Kipling
Departmental Ditties, 1886 Poems
Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888 Stories
Soldiers Three, 1888 Stories
Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, 1889 Stories
The Light That Failed, 1890 Novel
Life’s Handicap, 1891 Stories
Barrack-Room Ballads, 1892 Poems
Many Inventions, 1893 Stories
The Jungle Books, 1894–95 Novel
The Seven Seas, 1896 Poems
Captains Courageous, 1897 Poems
Stalky & Co., 1899 Novel
Kim, 1901 Novel
Just So Stories, 1902 Stories
The Five Nations, 1903 Poems
Traffics and Discoveries, 1904 Stories
Puck of Pook’s Hill, 1906 Stories
Actions and Reaction, 1909 Stories
Rewards and Fairies, 1910 Stories
A Diversity of Creatures, 1917 Stories
The Years Between, 1919 Poems
Debits and Credits, 1926 Stories
Biography and Criticism
Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Pegasus, 2009.
Amis, Kingsley. Rudyard Kipling and His World. New York: Scribners, 1975.
Bauer, Helen Pike. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Rudyard Kipling. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Carrington, Charles E. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. Rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Dobrée, Bonamy. Rudyard Kipling, Realist and Fabulist. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Eliot, T. S. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, Made by T. S. Eliot, with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling. London: Faber and Faber, 1941.
Gilbert, E. L., ed. Kipling and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1965.
Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Gross, John J., ed. The Age of Kipling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
Harrison, James. Rudyard Kipling. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Kipling, Rudyard. Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Thomas Pinney, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.
Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
Page, Norman. A Kipling Companion. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Ricketts, Harry. Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking, 1977.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
All fifteen stories in The Jungle Books had their original publication in magazines. Macmillan and Company, London and New York, published the first edition of The Jungle Book in 1894; the first edition of The Second Jungle Book followed in 1895. This Signet Classic is reprinted from these first editions. Typographical errors have been corrected.
1Literally, a rotted out tree-stump.
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