Rudyard Kipling – Interesting Literature

10 of the Best Stories by Rudyard Kipling

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific novelist, short-story writer, and poet, who is perhaps best-known for classic children’s books like The Jungle Book and for poems like ‘If—’. But Kipling’s short stories for adults often get overlooked – a fact which is perhaps hardly surprising given how much enduring and endurable writing Kipling produced.

Below, we select and introduce ten of the very best Rudyard Kipling short stories. These include horror stories, tales about werewolves, science fiction, and even a new take on the ghost story format. All will be explained below …

A Short Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is now closely associated with Remembrance Sunday and war remembrance more generally, it actually originated in a poem written almost twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’.

The Man Who Wrote by Himself: Kipling’s Just So Stories

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kipling’s classic volume of tales for children

Rudyard Kipling has the dubious honour of being both famous and infamous in modern times. He is infamous for some because of his links with empire and the outdated views he is seen to have promoted regarding the British Empire, particularly in India, where he was born. But he remains one of the most famous writers of his age for The Jungle Book, ‘If-’, ‘Gunga Din’, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and the Just So Stories. The last of these, it has often been claimed, did for very young children’s literature what The Jungle Book had done for slightly more grown-up children. Moving away from the heavy-handed moralising and the condescending tone found in much Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories, Kipling offered, in the Just So Stories, a witty narrative voice and inventive little tales which talked to children rather than at them.

Rudyard Kipling’s Detective Story: ‘The House Surgeon’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Kipling’s foray into the mystery genre with a psychic detective story

Previously, I’ve blogged about the intriguing micro-genre of the psychic detective story, a crossover short story genre which fuses the ghost story or weird tale with the mystery, or detective fiction. Arguably beginning with the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1869 story ‘Green Tea’, the form was pioneered by the late Victorian writing team of E. and H. Heron with their Flaxman Low stories, but became really popular during the Edwardian era, with characters such as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and, shortly after this, William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance.

The genre never exactly attracted a plethora of writers, in the way that the out-and-out detective story did, following the phenomenal success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. But it did attract the attention of some more famous and talented writers than the ones already mentioned. Perhaps the most famous of them all was Rudyard Kipling.

10 of the Best Rudyard Kipling Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a tireless experimenter with the short story form, a novelist, a writer who could entertain children and adults alike with such books as The Jungle Book, Plain Tales from the Hills, The Just So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and countless others. But as well as being a prolific author of fiction, Rudyard Kipling was also a hugely popular poet. But what are Kipling’s very best poems?