This absorbing, widely praised biography brings a fresh and sympathetic eye to the career of the prolific writer whose popular Jungle Books and collections of poems like Barracks Room Ballads as well as the masterly novel Kim propelled him to the pinnacle of literary success before he was forty. With illuminative reinterpretations of his work, it also follows Kipling through the next three decades that took this complex, troubled, and brilliant man to tragic personal disappointments and galling disrepute among the lions of literary fashion. In all, biographer Ricketts brings vibrantly to life the diverse worlds of imperialist India and Victorian London that both inspired and betrayed Kipling's genius.