Rudyard Kipling | 1865-1936 Rudyard Kipling was a bookish, unathletic boy, whose mannish appearance (he had a visible mustache at the age of 12) belied his physical weakness. This image of Kipling, unable to participate in games at his school and left to his books and his writing, is sharply out of line with the standard image of Kipling as jingoistic tubthumper. But a good deal of Kipling's biography is out of line with the picture of Kipling as imperial bully. This man who would famously celebrate the "day's work," making heroic the drudgery of imperial administration, was the son of a teacher of sculpture and the nephew of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, an important Pre-Raphaelite painter: In his youth in England (where he lived away from his parents between the ages of 6 and 16), Kipling was thought to be something of an aesthete. In other words, Kipling is more complicated than he is often made out to be, and this is especially evident in his writing for children. There are, of course, the Just-So Stories (1902), animal stories which are not very complicated. But Stalky & Co., his collection of school stories published in 1899, does more than glorify the athleticism and brutality of the public school; in it, Kipling admires boys for their cleverness and their mental agility more than for their physical forcefulness. If Captains Courageous (1897) is a typical model of the boys' adventure story, then Kim (1901) breaks that model. Both enjoy the temporary pleasure of evading authority, as the critic Irving Howe wrote; but Kim enacts a small revolution by representing Hindu spiritualism as real and even worthy at times, rather than as the figure of fun that many imperialist writers set up purely for the purpose of deflation. The Jungle Books (written in 1894 and 1895 in Vermont, during Kipling's "American period") are perhaps the most imperialist of the lot, with their emphasis on the rules of civilization and self-restraint. But they also propose a model of fairness, respect, and cooperation that is at least theoretically more humanist than imperialist. Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) revisit scenes in British history with the aid of Puck (two children in the stories accidentally call Shakespeare's fairy to life while performing A Midsummer Night's Dream), and these scenes provide sometimes complicated lessons about what it means to be an English child in the British Empire. After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and then during World War I (in which he lost a son) and the postwar years, Kipling became a more polarizing figure, one resembling the popular image we have of him today. But his writing for children suggests the possibility of a mind that could imagine life outside the rules of the British Empire.