Now this is the Law of the Jungle
- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 - January 18, 1936) was an English author and poet, born in Bombay, India, and best known for his works "The Jungle Book" (1894), "The Second Jungle Book" (1895), "Just So Stories" (1902), and "Puck of Pook's Hill" (1906); his novel, "Kim" (1901); his poems, including 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), and "If-" (1910); and his many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) and the collections "Life's Handicap" (1891), "The Day's Work" (1898), and "Plain Tales from the Hills" (1888). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best work speaks to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author Henry James famously said of him: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and he remains its youngest-ever recipient. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected.

(...from Wikipedia)

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

By the mid-1880s Rudyard Kipling was traveling around the subcontinent as a correspondent for the 'Allahabad Pioneer'. His fiction sales also began to bloom, and he published six short books of short stories in 1888. One short story dating from this time is "The Man Who Would Be a King", later made famous as a slightly differently named movie featuring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. The next year Kipling began a long journey back to England, going through Burma, China, Japan, and California before crossing the United States and the Atlantic Ocean and settling in London. From then on his fame grew rapidly, and he positioned himself as the literary voice most closely associated with the imperialist tempo of the time in the United Kingdom (and, indeed, the rest of the Western world and Japan). His first novel, "The Light That Failed", was published in 1890. The most famous of his poems of this time is probably "The Ballad of East and West" (which begins "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet")

In 1892 he married Caroline Balastier; her brother, an American writer, had been Kipling's friend but had died of typhoid fever the previous year. While on honeymoon Kipling's bank failed and cashing in their travel tickets only let the couple return as far as Vermont (where most of the Balastier family lived). Rudyard and his new bride lived in the United States for the next four years. During this time he turned his hand to writing for children, and he published the work for which he is most remembered today -- "The Jungle Book" -- and its sequel "The Second Jungle Book" -- in 1894 and 1895.
After a quarrel with his in-laws, he and his wife returned to England, and in 1897 he published "Captains Courageous". The next year he would begin traveling to southern Africa for winter vacations almost every year. There he would meet and befriend another icon of British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes, and begin collecting material for another of his children's classics, "Just So Stories (for Little Children)". That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, the Indian spy novel "Kim", first saw the light of day the previous year.

During the first decade of the 20th century, Kipling was at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; bookending this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections, 1906's "Puck of Pook Hill" and 1910's "Rewards and Fairies". (The latter contained the poem "If").

Kipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th-century European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I; Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his eldest son, John, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Partly in response, he joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves.
In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both an obligation and a ceremony formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer." Today, engineering graduates all across Canada, and even some in the United States, are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a brain hemorrhage in early 1936.
He continued falling into critical eclipse afterwards. As the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century and the ideas of communism gained influence, Kipling's works fell far out of step with the times. His main literary legacy in the period immediately following his death was on American science fiction, as John W. Campbell considered him an ideal to be followed. Many science fiction writers still consciously follow his example. After the death of Kipling's wife in 1939, his house in Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public museum to the author.

Though our smoke may hide the
Heavens from your eyes, ~
It will vanish and the
stars will shine again, ~
Because, for all our power
and weight and size, ~
We are nothing more
than children of your brain!

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Doesn't that feel good?