The Man Who Would Be King

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Rudyard Kipling was born in India to British parents in 1865. After a Dickensian childhood in an English boarding school, he returned to India and became a journalist. In the late 1880s his short fiction began appearing in inexpensive editions for rail travelers, and he soon became famous. In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, moved briefly to the U.S., then returned to England after their daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia. In the aftermath, Kipling wrote some of his best-known books and poems, including The Jungle Book, Kim, and Gunga Din, and in 1907 he became the first Englishman, and the youngest person ever, to win the Nobel Prize. After his only son, John, was killed in World War I, Kipling’s writing decreased, until he died in 1936.