num_pages: 218
description: Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): short storywriter, author and poet, but also imperialist, racist, misogynist, and sexually confused? Kipling’s life and experiences spanned exhilaration (growing up in India during the Raj) and cataclysm (losing his only son in World War I). He has been vilified as an imperialist and racist; his work considered ‘politically incorrect’. Yet, he is one of the few, if not only, writers of the time to describe his world in exacting, caring detail - to tell us of ‘the little man’, whether private soldier, sailor or a poor native boy. Having lived a charmed early childhood in India and experienced a rather more horrid existence in foster homes and boarding schools as a boy, Kipling’s early years equipped him with an imagination that allowed him to create such ever popular children’s classics as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories for Children. Perhaps because his poetry was more straightforward and easily understood in a single reading, critics have not bothered to analyze it for hidden meaning and warning, looking for the irony behind the simple language he used. If he was truly a champion of British Imperialism, why would he turn down a knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, yet accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907? Is Kipling the Man as simple to understand as his work or is there complexity hiding under the veneer? Would a committed patriot and imperialist pen lines such as ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.’ (‘Common Form’, 1919). This new biography sheds light on the man and places him in context as a sensitive artist of his time.
language: English
title: Kipling
titlecomplete: Kipling
ratings_count: 5
publisher: Haus Publishers Ltd.