"By the time Rudyard Kipling turned thirty-three, he was already scaling the heights of literary success that accompanied the publication of his Jungle Books and tales of India, yet when he died in 1936 at the age of seventy-one, the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for literature had lost virtually all reputation among the lions of the literary fashion.". "In this absorbing study of Kipling's rigorous career and fresh reinterpretation of his work, biographer Harry Ricketts brings vibrantly to life the man who authored Kim, Captains Courageous, Soldiers There, and Gunga Din as well as the world that inspired and betrayed his imaginative genius."--BOOK JACKET.