Rudyard Kipling (born 149 years ago on December 30, 1865) lived an imperial life, and the tensions that marked this long-vanished way of living have marked his body of work and complicated his reputation. He was born in Mumbai (then called Bombay), and his parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians, reflecting both their English heritage and their decision to live in an India that was still part of the vast British Empire. His recollections of his early life reflected this strange mix of Victorian and Hindu culture, as he recalled being told “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma” by the nannies who cared for him and sang Indian nursery stories to him in the local vernacular.

While Kipling spent much of his life in either India or England, it was during a brief stay in New England when the germ of what would become his most famous work came to him. Perhaps the snow piled up outside the windows of the Vermont cottage where his wife gave birth to their two daughters during a four-year stay in America made him think fondly of his time back on the steamy subcontinent, as he later recalled beginning work on “The Jungle Book” during a long winter. Kipling claimed to populate the stories with everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." The stories were published in magazines in 1893-94, and then collected in two books. Some of the stories involved a boy named Mowgli being raised by wolves and learning lessons from different animals, and are the source of Kipling’s most enduring fame.

Kipling was a prolific writer, however, and churned out many other works during his life, leading to a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, in honor of his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.” He was the first English-language speaker to win the six-year-old award.

Kipling was widely celebrated in his day, although the imperialist tone of his works has complicated his reputation since his death at age 70 in 1936. But while he celebrated aspects of empire (he was a strong proponent of England's effort to subjugate the Boer population in South Africa), he was clear-eyed on the most pressing moral questions of his day. The swastika was an ancient good luck symbol in India throughout most of his life, and he included it on the covers of some of his books. But after Hitler came to power in Germany, he ordered that it stop being used on his works.

He was also fond of the outdoor life, and allowed characters from the Jungle Books to be associated with Scouting. His poem “If —“ is a collection of fatherly advice (published 20 years before his own son died in World War I) and ends with the words “you’ll be a Man, my son.” One Indian historian has described the Victorian verse as the essence of the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in English. Rudyard Kipling took the best from every culture he encountered…perhaps the most that could be asked of a life lived in the shadow of empire.

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