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Introduction

Rudyard Kipling

If you are familiar with Baloo (the bear) and Mowgli (the young boy) from the movie Jungle Book, then you are already partly aware of Rudyard Kipling, who created the original characters. The movie was adapted from Kipling’s most successful book, and like much of Kipling’s famous work, it focuses on children and animal characters. The Jungle Book, a story that takes place in a tropical forest, was authored while Kipling’s writing room was almost buried in snow in Vermont. The author claims that he thought about Mowgli that cold winter and then sat back and watched his pen write the lost boy’s story. The book proved so successful, the author spent almost as much time reading letters sent to him from children as he did writing.

Essential Facts

1. In 1907, Kipling received a Nobel Prize for literature, the first English-language author to win the prestigious award.
2. Kipling was named after Rudyard Lake in Britain, the place where his parents first met.
3. When he was six, Kipling was sent from India, where his parents lived, back to England. He stayed with a very strict family whom Kipling later described as causing him such great terror that it led him to write.
4. Kipling’s first book, Stalky and Co., relates juvenile tales of revenge, dead cats, bullying, and initial explorations into the topic of sex.
5. Kipling might have lived in Vermont for the rest of his life were it not for his brother-in-law, who made a huge public display of threatening to physically abuse Kipling. This sent Kipling and his family back home to Britain.