It's the birthday of short-story writer, poet, and novelist (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling (books by this author), born in Bombay, India (1865). His father was a British artist who got an appointment to run an art school in Bombay, but after a series of typhoid and cholera outbreaks, Kipling's parents decided to send him back to England for his own safety.
After school, he went off to the northwest corner of India, where the British were fighting a war with Afghanistan. Kipling got a job on an army newspaper, and he also began writing fiction and poetry. After six years of publishing his work, he sold everything he'd written for £250 to a company that began selling paperback editions of his collected works in railway stations around India. Those paperback editions became more successful than anyone had ever expected, and suddenly magazines and newspapers were begging Kipling to write for them. He moved back to London, where he'd become a literary celebrity, but he found the life of a celebrity did not agree with him.
He traveled the world for a few years and finally settled in Vermont. And it was there, in a rented cottage surrounded by snow, that he began to reimagine the India of his childhood, and he wrote the book for which he's best known today,The Jungle Book (1894), about a boy raised by wolves who grows up with the other jungle animals until a tiger forces him to go back and live with people.
Kipling said: "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."
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