The Man Who Would Be King

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Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. Written over a period of five years, from 1885 to 1888, the seventeen stories in this collection offer a wry, vivid, and captivating glimpse of the development of Kipling's oeuvre over fifty years: the harsh, cruel realism that marks his most memorable works, the experimental modernism of his middle period, and the highly wrought subtleties of his later pieces. "The Man Who Would Be King" is a far- fetched adventure that serves as a parable of colonialism, while other stories feature tales of criminals, ghosts, femmes fatales, madness, and murder.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. During his time at the United Services College, he began to write poetry, privately publishing Schoolboy Lyrics in 1881. The following year he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches, and poems —including "Mandalay," "Gunga Din," and "Danny Deever"—which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. While living in Vermont with his wife, an American, Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Kim—which became widely regarded as his greatest long work, putting him high among the chronicles of British expansion. Kipling returned to England in 1902, but he continued to travel widely and write, though he never enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. In 1907, he became the first British writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He died in 1936