Although Kipling has never lost his hold on a large and admiring public, recent years have witnessed an increasing critical interest in his work. This book approaches Kipling as a writer who, from the outset of his career, sensed a potential or actual horror at the heart of things. It examines Kipling's search for meaning, a research pursued on the political, moral, and religious planes, through original and highly sophisticated explorations of history and myth. It presents Kipling as a person who knew and understood his own suffering and used it in his search for strategies to deal with the temptations of pessimism that he had known and also the prevailing temptations in a political and intellectual crisis he felt obliged to address.