Kipling has been called a misogynist, and often his characters, particularly those in the military, blame women for their own and others’ misfortunes. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)Ī number of his stories pivot around the relations between men and women. Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936), the English author. His fame or notoriety was almost instantaneous, in part because of the locations and subject matter of the stories, because of his use of dialect in re-creating the voices of his nonestablishment characters, and because Kipling’s early writings appeared at a time when England and Western civilization as a whole were caught up in imperial dreams and rivalries. Love, especially doomed love, terror and the macabre, revenge and its consequences-these were the elements upon which his stories turned, even later when the settings were often English. Kipling focused, however, not on the glories and conquests of empire but on the lives-work and activities, passions and emotions-of ordinary people responding to what were often extraordinary or inexplicable events.

His art arrived almost fully revealed in his earliest works. Kipling was a voracious reader of English, French, and American writers, trained by his newspaper experience in the virtues of conciseness and detail. The intervening years at school in England had perhaps increased his sensitivity to the exotic Indian locale and British imperial presence. Many of Rudyard Kipling’s earliest short stories are set in the India of his early childhood years in Bombay and his newspaper days in Lahore.

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