Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India on December 20th, 1865, is one of Britain's most famous writers, although his work never attracted the critical acclaim that writers like E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats enjoyed. His reputation has suffered in contemporary times due to the sentimentality of his work as well as the themes of imperialism and cultural hegemony.
Kipling began his life with his family in India – his father a director of an art museum and his mother a socialite – until, at five years old, he and his sister Alice ("Trix") moved to Southsea, England. Kipling felt isolated and neglected in the shoddy care of a family who boarded the children of British...
