Rudyard Kipling: A Life

By Harry Ricketts

Book Overview

This absorbing, widely praised biography brings a fresh and sympathetic eye to the career of the prolific writer whose popular Jungle Books and collections of poems like Barracks Room Ballads as well as the masterly novel Kim propelled him to the pinnacle of literary success before he was forty. With illuminative reinterpretations of his work, it also follows Kipling through the next three decades that took this complex, troubled, and brilliant man to tragic personal disappointments and galling disrepute among the lions of literary fashion. In all, biographer Ricketts brings vibrantly to life the diverse worlds of imperialist India and Victorian London that both inspired and betrayed Kipling's genius.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786708301
• ISBN13: 9780786708307
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Da Capo
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Exceptional

Clearly the best Kipling biography in many years. Mr. Ricketts has a fine touch, especially for Kipling's early years. If his later life wasn't as exotic and interesting, that's Kipling's affair. I think the mainstream reviewers had it right ('Splendid,' said The Atlantic Monthly, 'irresistibly readable,' said The New Yorker). Insightful and engaging.