Biography Essay

The years 1890-1932, during which Joseph Rudyard Kipling was having his books published in London and New York, coincided with the development of modernism and its establishment as the dominant literary style of the twentieth century. Kipling's immense body of writing—5 novels, roughly 250 short stories, more than 800 pages of verse, and many nonfiction pieces— seems to have little obvious relationship to modernism. Yet his books were extremely popular; 15 million volumes of his collected stories alone were sold. Kipling's work, particularly his poetry, has received far less scholarly and critical attention than the efforts of major modernist writers, and he has not had as great an influence as writers such as William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens on generations of successive writers. Kipling's inability to inspire the most intense kinds of critical interest and literary imitation seems due equally to...