The Light that Failed

Rudyard Kipling was the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize in literature (1907); his many short stories and poems are testimony to a captivating and exacting talent. Kipling was born in India, spent an unhappy childhood at schools and foster homes in Britain, and returned to India at age seventeen to become a journalist and writer. He lived successively in India, Vermont, and Britain, writing many of his adventure stories in rural New England or Sussex. His more famous writings include the poems "Gunga Din," and "Mandalay," and the prose works Kim, The Jungle Book, and Just So Stories.