It is easy to underestimate the variety, complexity, and subtlety of Rudyard Kipling 's writing. He became an extraordinarily popular writer in the 1890s with short stories and poems enlivened by strange and interesting settings, a brisk narrative economy, and the fresh energy of the voices that told his tales, sometimes in working-class dialects and usually in the smart, confident tone of someone who affected to know how the world really worked. Readers and critics who esteemed the refined melancholy and stylistic elaborations of the fin de siècle often thought his effects coarse and common. The loose colloquial forms and development of his tales and fables came to seem obvious and old-fashioned to early-twentieth-century readers learning to enjoy the compression and elliptical styles of James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf and the rhetorical intensity of D. H. Lawrence. Kipling's popularity itself sometimes made him suspect...