Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English author, poet, and journalist. Born in Malabar Hill, Bombay Presidency, British India, the son of a British art professor and his wife, he was the first cousin of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Kipling was educated in Devon before becoming a newspaper assistant editor in Lahore in 1882. He worked as a journalist from 1883 to 1889, and he began writing short stories. In 1889, he moved to London after a journey with stops in Japan and across the United States, and he lived near Charing Cross, writing several stories for local magazines. He published the books The Jungle Book in 1894 and The Second Jungle Book in 1895, Kim in 1901, and the Just So Stories in 1902, as well as the poems Mandalay in 1890, Gunga Din in 1890, The White Man's Burden in 1899, and If- in 1910. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, and he declined a British poet laureateship and a knighthood several times.
Kipling was a staunch imperialist and British unionist, identifying himself with the Irish Unionist Alliance and writing the poem Ulster in 1912, opposing Irish home rule due to his staunch anti-Catholicism. He also opposed Bolshevik communism and wrote anti-German propaganda during World War I, securing a commission in the British Army for his son John Kipling, who was later killed in action at the 1915 Battle of Loos. Kipling himself died in 1936 in Fitzrovia at the age of 70.