Life and History of Rudyard Kipling
Meanwhile, Kipling's poetry included Gunga Din (1892) and The White Man's Burden (1899) while publishing a series of articles, A Fleet in Being, which debated the British response to the rise of German naval power.
As the 20th century began, Kipling saw the height of his professional career. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, which was bookend by two collections of poetry and stories, Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies, which inluded the poem If (1910).
Kipling's reputation began to fall with the outbreak of World War I. He suffered a personal tragedy with the loss of his eldest son, John, during the Battle of Loos. Due to this, he joined Sire Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now known as Commonwealth War Graves Commission) and became responsible for the garden-like war graves dotted along the former Western Front. His largest contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" which is found on Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves. During this time, Kipling also wrote a history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment.
With the growth of the automobile, Kipling began traveling around England and abroad as a correspondent for the British press.
Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but with far less success than before. Rudyard Kipling died of a brain haemorrhage on January 18, 1936 and was buried in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey.
After his wife's death in 1939, his house, Batemans in Burwash, East Sussex, was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public museum to the famous author. There is also a thriving Kipling Society and a boarding house at Haileybury named after him.Back to Rudyard Kipling biography