Rudyard Kipling Biography Quotes 33 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, then part of British India. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and museum curator, and his mother, Alice Kipling (nee MacDonald), came from a family that connected him to influential circles in Britain. The family atmosphere mixed art, letters, and public service, and the city around him was a polyglot place whose sounds and stories left a lasting mark on his imagination. In early childhood he moved between English domestic life and the sensory world of India, an experience that later suffused his fiction and verse. He had a younger sister, Alice, known as Trix, who would also write, and with whom he shared some of his first literary experiments.

Education and Apprenticeship in India
At the age of six he was sent to England and spent difficult years in a foster household in Southsea before attending the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, a school designed for the sons of officers and officials bound for imperial service. His eyesight was weak, and he was not athletic, but he thrived on reading and on the companionship of boys who would later appear, thinly veiled, in his school stories. In 1882 he returned to the subcontinent to work as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later for the Pioneer in Allahabad. The newsroom routine taught him speed, clarity, and a keen ear for dialogue. Those years also brought his first books, including departmental satires, sketches, and stories. He and Trix collaborated on an early volume, and he quickly found a readership for the brisk, vivid tales that became Plain Tales from the Hills.

Emergence as a Writer
By 1889 Kipling had left journalism to try his fortune in London. He arrived with a sheaf of Indian stories and a reputation for energy. Collections and novels followed in quick succession. Barrack-Room Ballads revealed his command of the vernacular and his interest in the lives of ordinary soldiers. Editors, reviewers, and established authors took notice, and he moved with increasing confidence through literary circles. The American writer Wolcott Balestier became an important collaborator; together they produced The Naulahka. Balestier's death in 1891 brought Kipling into close contact with the Balestier family and with friends such as Henry James, who would play a role at a decisive moment in Kipling's life.

Marriage, Vermont Years, and Major Works
In 1892 he married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier in London, with Henry James giving the bride away. The couple settled for several years near Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling worked at high speed and clarity, producing Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, and many poems and essays. The household included Carrie's relatives and, in time, the couple's children. Domesticity and the landscape of New England mingled with remembered India in the fables and animal stories that made his name familiar to readers of all ages. A family dispute and the strain of publicity contributed to their decision to leave the United States.

Return to England and Literary Maturity
Kipling returned to Britain in the late 1890s, lived for a period in Rottingdean, and in 1902 bought Bateman's, a seventeenth-century house in Burwash, Sussex, which remained his home. The Sussex years were a period of consolidation and breadth. He published Kim, a novel distilling his Indian experience into a portrait of espionage, friendship, and cultural crossings, and Just So Stories, whimsical tales addressed to a child's ear yet resonant with adult wit. In essays and travel writing he observed technology, sea power, and the changing face of empire, while the poem If-, printed in 1910, became a widely quoted expression of stoic self-command.

Politics, Empire, and Public Reputation
Kipling's reputation grew alongside controversies over the meaning of empire. Poems such as The White Man's Burden and his journalism from South Africa during the Boer War placed him at the center of debates about power, responsibility, and race. Admirers praised his narrative gift and technical mastery; critics questioned the attitudes they thought they discerned in his imperial themes. He was nonetheless read across political divides, and fellow writers and public figures, including his cousin Stanley Baldwin, valued his insight into industrial Britain and its imperial commitments.

War, Loss, and Commemoration
The First World War brought shattering personal grief. His only son, John, was killed in 1915, a loss that darkened the remainder of Kipling's life and deepened his involvement in public memorialization. He served as literary advisor to the Imperial War Graves Commission, helping to shape the language of remembrance used on British and Commonwealth graves and memorials. Poems and short pieces from this period, including Epitaphs of the War, combine austerity with compassion, and his prose reflections reveal a father's search for meaning amid national catastrophe.

Nobel Laureate and Later Years
In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in English to receive the honor, recognized for narrative brilliance, imaginative vigor, and a style that animated both poetry and prose. He traveled widely, lectured, and maintained friendships across the Atlantic, corresponding with figures in letters and politics. Yet he increasingly preferred the quiet routine of Bateman's with Carrie managing the household and literary affairs. His health declined in the 1920s and 1930s, but he continued to publish stories, verse, and autobiographical sketches, including Something of Myself, which offers a guarded account of his formation, his craft, and the people who shaped his sensibility, among them his father, his sister Trix, and colleagues from his newspaper days.

Death and Legacy
Rudyard Kipling died on 18 January 1936 in London and was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. His reputation has shifted over time, but his technical virtuosity, gift for storytelling, and the range of his work remain central to discussions of modern English literature. Writers and critics continue to engage with his portraits of India, his sea and soldier ballads, and his children's tales, while historians read him as a witness to the ambitions and anxieties of the age that formed him. Around him stood family and friends who helped and challenged him: John Lockwood and Alice Kipling in his formative years; Caroline Balestier as partner and protector of his working life; Wolcott Balestier and Henry James in his early London and American connections; and, in later years, colleagues who joined him in the collective labor of remembrance after war. Through these ties and through the work itself, Kipling's life traces the arc of a global Britain and the personal costs of its expansion and conflicts.

Our collection contains 33 quotes who is written by Rudyard, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Art - Deep.

Other people realated to Rudyard: Max Beerbohm (Actor), William McFee (Writer), William Ernest Henley (Poet), Gilbert Parker (Politician), Dean Stockwell (Actor), King George V (Royalty), Adela Florence Nicolson (Poet), Walter de La Mare (Poet)