Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, sent to England at five for a wretched childhood in foster care and school, and returned to India at sixteen as a journalist in Lahore. The stories and verse he wrote there, including Plain Tales from the Hills and The Phantom 'Rickshaw, made him famous in London before he was twenty-five. The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories, Barrack-Room Ballads and the poem "If" followed. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the youngest ever. His imperialism made him unfashionable in his lifetime; his craft as a short-story writer has outlasted that.