Kipling was born in Bombay, India. His father was John Lockwood Kipling, a teacher at the local Jeejeebhoy School of Art, and his mother was Alice Macdonald. His mother's sister was married to the artist [Edward Burne-Jones]?, and young Kipling and his sister spent much time with the Joneses in England from the ages of six to twelve, while his parents remained in India.
In 1881, after a spell at boarding school, Kipling returned to India himself, to Lahore? (in modern-day Pakistan) where his parents now lived. He found work as a newspaper editor for a local edition and took tentative steps into the world of poetry; in 1883, he made his first professional sales.
By the mid-1880s he was travelling the subcontinent as a correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer. His fiction sales began to bloom, and in 1888 he published six short books of short stories. One short story from this time "'The Man Who Would Be a King", later became a famous film with a slightly different name, starring Sean Connery.
The next year Kipling began a long journey back to England, going through Burma, China, Japan, and California before crossing the United States and the Atlantic Ocean and settling in London.
From then on his fame grew rapidly, and he made himself the literary voice most closely associated with the imperialist tempo of the time in the United Kingdom (and, indeed, the rest of the Western world and Japan).
In 1890, he published his first novel, The Light that Failed. The most famous of his poems of this time is probably "The Ballad of East and West" (which begins "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet")
In 1892 he married Caroline Balastier; her brother, an American writer, had been Kipling's friend but died of [typhoid fever]? the previous year. While on honeymoon, Kipling's bank failed and cashing in their travel tickets only let the couple return as far as Vermont (where most of the Balastier family lived).
For the next four years, Rudyard and his new bride would live in the United States. During this time he turned his hand to writing for children, and published the work for which he is best remembered -- [The Jungle Book]? -- and its sequel in 1894 and 1895.
After a quarrel with his in-laws, he and his wife returned to England, and in 1897 he published [Captains Courageous]?. The next year he began travelling to southern Africa for winter vacations most every year. There he befriended another icon of British imperialism, [Cecil Rhodes]?, and began collecting material for another of his children's classics, [Just So Stories]? for Little Children.
He published this in 1902, and another of his enduring works. In 1901, the Indian spy novel Kim?, had been published. His poetry of the time included "The White Man's Burden". In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles collectively entitled A Fleet in Being.
During the first decade of the 20th century, Kipling was at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature; bookending this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections, 1906's Puck of Pook Hill and 1910's Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained what is arguably Kipling's single most famous poem "If--?", an exhortation to seize the day containing the famous lines
As closely associated as Kipling's popularity was with the expansive, confident attitude of European civilization at the end of the 19th century, it should come as no surprise that his reputation suffered in the years of and after World War I; Kipling also knew personal tragedy: his eldest son, John, died in 1915 at the [Battle of Loos]?.
Partly in response, he joined [Sir Fabian Ware]?'s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the [Commonwealth War Graves Commission]?), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former [Western Front]?.
Kipling continued writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and to much less success. In early 1936, he died of a brain hemhorrage, and suffered a continuing critical eclipse afterwards. It is hard to place Kipling in the pantheon of great writers, as much of the criticism directed at him has much more to do with his embodiment of the imperialist ideal than the actual work; as the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century and communism presented attitudes that were intriguing to some western intelligentsia, Kipling's works far, far out of step with the times.
If he had any literary legacy in the period just after his death, it was on American science fiction, as John W. Campbell considered him an ideal model, as do many SF writers today.
It's worth noting that today he is most highly regarded for his children's books, while in his own lifetime he was primarily read as a poet (and was even offered the post of British [Poet Laureate]?; he turned it down).
There are signs of rehabilitation in Kipling's reputation both as a writer of mature prose and of poetry, as public tastes change again.
After the death of Kipling's sole surviving child in 1974, his mansion in Sussex? was bequeathed to the [National Trust]? and is now a public museum to the author.
Critics have found in his works both both advocacy and criticism of Victorian? colonialism.
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