Rudyard Kipling is better known as a poet and short-story writer than as a novelist. He wrote only three novels and collaborated with Wolcott Balestier on another, highly forgettable one. The shorter forms were his métier, and after the publication of Kim in 1901, Kipling never attempted another novel.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865, to John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald Kipling. His father at this time was professor of architectural sculpture in the School of Art in Bombay. Kipling had a pampered early childhood surrounded by servants. At the age of five and a half, however, along with his sister, two years younger, Kipling was taken to live with a family in Southsea to begin his "anglicization" and early schooling. The next five years were, in the main, years of misery. In addition to feelings of bewilderment and abandonment, Kipling had...