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Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Today he is probably best known for his fiction which includes include The Jungle Book published in 1894, Kim (1901), and the The Man Who Would Be King. His poetry includes Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and If— (1910). Although born in India, where his father worked as a sculptor and architecture lecturer, he was send to England for his schooling at the age of five. After finishing school, he returned to India and became a journalist and writer, dashing off fictional short stories as well as local reporting. In 1899 he returned to England where he met and married his American born wife Caroline Balestier. The pair headed off to her homeland the US where he began to plan and write his Jungle Book stories and wrote several of his best known poems. The Kiplings returned to England were Kipling was a standard bearer for Empire and, later, firmly in favour of the British involvement in patriotic support of the First World War. His views changed following the death of his son John, aged 18, who killed in action at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. Even so, post-war he continued to expound right-wing views calling Ramsay MacDonald Labour government as “Bolshevism without bullets”. That said he was strongly against the fascism and following the rise of Nazis in Germany he ordered that his books stop being printed with the reverse swastika, a symbol of good luck. He died following an operation on his small intestine after suffering from a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling’s work remains popular, The Jungle Book has been adapted for the big screen several times, but he is a controversial figure to many new audiences who say that his views, as displayed in The White Man’s Burden in which he argues how it is the responsibility of white men to “civilise” black and Asian people through colonialism, show that he was a racist. This is one of a small cluster of roads named after poets. Authors and poets were, and remain, popular choices for street names by developers.
