Literary Lives
1 total work
Rudyard Kipling made his name as the poet and story-teller of the British in India, but his stories (over 300) include tales for children, studies of love and hate, of healing and revenge, of the Sussex countryside and of the supernatural. His poems, including 'If' and the Barrack-Room Ballads, are among the best known and most quoted in the language. He was a newspaperman by training and instinct, and a gifted travel writer. He was too an intensely political man, a friend of Cecil Rhodes, one of the fiercest opponents of Irish Home Rule, a speechwriter for King George V, and cousin to Stanley Baldwin. This fascinating book traces Kipling's difficult private life, his dealings with the literary and political world of his time, the rise and fall of his reputation, and his right to be considered the greatest English writer of the short story.