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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher at the city’s school of art, and his wife Alice Macdonald. At the age of five he was sent to England with his younger sister and boarded with a family in Southsea, an unhappy period he later described in fiction. From 1878 he attended the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon.
In 1882 Kipling returned to India and worked as a journalist, first on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later on The Pioneer in Allahabad. His first widely noticed books came from these years: the verse collection Departmental Ditties (1886) and the stories of Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).
Kipling moved to London in 1889, where his soldiers’ songs in Cockney dialect, including “Danny Deever,” “Tommy,” “Gunga Din,” and “Mandalay,” were collected as Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). That year he married Caroline Balestier, an American, and the couple lived for several years in Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). Later verse collections include The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903), and Songs from Books (1912). His novel Kim appeared in 1901 and the Just So Stories in 1902.
In 1902 the Kiplings settled at Bateman’s, a house in Burwash, Sussex. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Their son John was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling afterward worked with the Imperial War Graves Commission. Many of his poems, such as “The White Man’s Burden,” reflect the imperial outlook of his era and are often read today with that historical context in mind.
Kipling died in London on 18 January 1936 and his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow public domain editions of Kipling’s poems published before 1929, so spelling and dialect may differ from later editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit Rudyard Kipling Poems.