Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original one may have been torn down and replaced decades ago. School of Art in Bombay was for many years used as the dean's residence. Kipling's birth home on the campus of the J.J. A third sister, Louisa, was the mother of Kipling's most prominent relative, his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of Alice's sisters were married to artists: Georgiana to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes to Edward Poynter. They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that they named their first child after it. John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. Alice (one of the four noted MacDonald sisters) was a vivacious woman, of whom Lord Dufferin would say, "Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room." John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay. Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with." But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: " is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled.
The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed with the political and social climate of the age. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. His children's books are classics one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift."
He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His poems include " Mandalay" (1890), " Gunga Din" (1890), " The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), " The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899), and " If-" (1910). Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including " The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). He was born in India, which inspired much of his work.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( / ˈ r ʌ d j ər d/ RUD-yərd 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.