92 Facts About Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist.

Rudyard Kipling was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

Rudyard Kipling is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.

Rudyard Kipling was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.

Rudyard Kipling seems to have said as much to the dean when visiting JJ School in the 1930s.

Rudyard Kipling referred to the place as "the House of Desolation".

Rudyard Kipling was to be assistant editor of a local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette.

Rudyard Kipling sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October.

From 1883 to 1889, Rudyard Kipling worked in British India for local newspapers such as the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad.

The former, which was the newspaper Rudyard Kipling was to call his "mistress and most true love", appeared six days a week throughout the year, except for one-day breaks for Christmas and Easter.

That year brought a change of editors at the newspaper; Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Rudyard Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.

Rudyard Kipling's family became annual visitors to Simla, and Lockwood Rudyard Kipling was asked to serve in Christ Church there.

Rudyard Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town featured prominently in many stories he wrote for the Gazette.

Rudyard Kipling included most of them in Plain Tales from the Hills, his first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday.

Rudyard Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889 after a dispute.

Rudyard Kipling decided to use the money to move to London, the literary centre of the British Empire.

Rudyard Kipling was favourably impressed by Japan, calling its people and ways "gracious folk and fair manners".

The Nobel Prize committee cited Rudyard Kipling's writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

Rudyard Kipling soon made his debut in the London literary world, to great acclaim.

Rudyard Kipling found a place to live for the next two years at Villiers Street, near Charing Cross :.

In 1891, as advised by his doctors, Rudyard Kipling took another sea voyage, to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

Rudyard Kipling cut short his plans to spend Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Balestier's sudden death from typhoid fever and decided to return to London immediately.

Rudyard Kipling named this Naulakha, in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelt correctly.

From his early years in Lahore, Rudyard Kipling had become enamoured with the Mughal architecture, especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually inspired the title of his novel as well as the house.

Rudyard Kipling especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books and corresponding with many children who wrote to him about them.

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893, and the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Rudyard Kipling an extended golf lesson.

Rudyard Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.

Rudyard Kipling loved the outdoors, not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall.

In February 1896, Elsie Rudyard Kipling was born, the couple's second daughter.

The incident led to Beatty's eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing and the resulting publicity, Rudyard Kipling's privacy was destroyed, and he was left feeling miserable and exhausted.

Rudyard Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings.

Rudyard Kipling had begun work on two poems, "Recessional" and "The White Man's Burden", which were to create controversy when published.

Rudyard Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to admire the men and their politics.

Back in England, Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, became a correspondent for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, which had been commandeered by Lord Roberts for British troops.

Rudyard Kipling wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.

Rudyard Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley.

In 1902, Rudyard Kipling bought Bateman's, a house built in 1634 and located in rural Burwash.

Rudyard Kipling was offended by the German Emperor Wilhelm II's Hun speech in 1900, urging German troops being sent to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion to behave like "Huns" and take no prisoners.

Rudyard Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists, who opposed Irish autonomy.

Rudyard Kipling was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule in Ireland.

Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to a friend that Ireland was not a nation, and that before the English arrived in 1169, the Irish were a gang of cattle thieves living in savagery and killing each other while "writing dreary poems" about it all.

Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem "Ulster" in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics.

Rudyard Kipling often referred to the Irish Unionists as "our party".

Rudyard Kipling was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard.

Rudyard Kipling so loved his Masonic experience that he memorialised its ideals in his poem "The Mother Lodge", and used the fraternity and its symbols as vital plot devices in his novella The Man Who Would Be King.

At the beginning of the First World War, like many other writers, Rudyard Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems enthusiastically supporting the UK war aims of restoring Belgium, after it had been occupied by Germany, together with generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good.

In September 1914, Rudyard Kipling was asked by the government to write propaganda, an offer that he accepted.

Alongside his passionate antipathy towards Germany, Rudyard Kipling was privately deeply critical of how the war was being fought by the British Army, complaining as early as October 1914 that Germany should have been defeated by now, and something must be wrong with the British Army.

Rudyard Kipling, who was shocked by the heavy losses that the British Expeditionary Force had taken by the autumn of 1914, blamed the entire pre-war generation of British politicians who, he argued, had failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War.

Rudyard Kipling had scorn for men who shirked duty in the First World War.

In "The New Army in Training", Rudyard Kipling concluded by saying:.

Rudyard Kipling's father had been lifelong friends with Lord Roberts, former commander-in-chief of the British Army, and colonel of the Irish Guards, and at Rudyard's request, John was accepted into the Irish Guards.

John Rudyard Kipling was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent.

Rudyard Kipling was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, with a possible facial injury.

However, Rudyard Kipling was indeed emotionally devastated by the death of his son.

Rudyard Kipling is said to have assuaged his grief by reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.

Rudyard Kipling became friends with a French soldier named Maurice Hammoneau, whose life had been saved in the First World War when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet.

Partly in response to John's death, Rudyard Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission, the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried.

Rudyard Kipling chose the inscription "The Glorious Dead" on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London.

Rudyard Kipling hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president.

Rudyard Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt's death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the "game" of world politics.

Rudyard Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had "passed bodily out of civilization".

In 1920, Rudyard Kipling co-founded the Liberty League with Haggard and Lord Sydenham.

Rudyard Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally titled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer".

In 1922 Rudyard Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.

Similarly, Rudyard Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany's favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war.

An admirer of Raymond Poincare, Rudyard Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position.

In contrast to the popular British view of Poincare as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany with unreasonable reparations, Rudyard Kipling argued that he was rightfully trying to preserve France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation.

Rudyard Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany's larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate.

In 1924, Rudyard Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as "Bolshevism without bullets".

Rudyard Kipling believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and "excited orders and instructions from Moscow" would expose Labour as such to the British people.

Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture.

Rudyard Kipling used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.

Less than a year before his death, Rudyard Kipling gave a speech to the Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935, warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.

Rudyard Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC's Empire Service by George V in 1932.

Rudyard Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than before.

Rudyard Kipling underwent surgery, but died at Middlesex Hospital in London less than a week later on 18 January 1936, at the age of 70, of a perforated duodenal ulcer.

Rudyard Kipling's body was laid in state in the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of Middlesex Hospital, after his death, and is commemorated with a plaque near the altar.

Rudyard Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes interred at Poets' Corner, part of the south transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

One reason for Rudyard Kipling's power [was] his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one.

Rudyard Kipling identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition.

Rudyard Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally.

Rudyard Kipling dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.

Rudyard Kipling recorded several albums of Kipling's verse set to traditional airs, or to tunes of his own composition written in traditional style.

However, in the case of the bawdy folk song, "The Bastard King of England", which is commonly credited to Rudyard Kipling, it is believed that the song is actually misattributed.

Rudyard Kipling often is quoted in discussions of contemporary British political and social issues.

In 1911, Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem "The Reeds of Runnymede" that celebrated the Magna Carta, and summoned up a vision of the "stubborn Englishry" determined to defend their rights.

Rudyard Kipling's enduring relevance has been noted in the United States, as it has become involved in Afghanistan and other areas about which he wrote.

In 1903, Rudyard Kipling gave permission to Elizabeth Ford Holt to borrow themes from the Jungle Books to establish Camp Mowglis, a summer camp for boys on the shores of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire.

In modern-day India, whence he drew much of his material, Rudyard Kipling's reputation remains controversial, especially among modern nationalists and some post-colonial critics.

Rudyard Kipling alludes to Kipling in his novel All About H Hatterr:.

Rudyard Kipling's bibliography includes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.