Author, Nobel Prize in Literature Recipient. Born the son of John Lockwood Kipling, a teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art, and Alice Macdonald Kipling in Bombay, India. His care was entrusted to his ayah who taught him Hindustani in the nursery. At six, he was taken to England by his parents, and, for five years, he was left at a foster home in Southsea where he hated his treatment and his situation. In 1878, Kipling entered United Services College, a boarding school in Devon. Kipling returned to India in 1882, where he worked as a journalist in Lahore for the Civil and Military Gazette and as an assistant editor and overseas correspondent in Allahabad for the Pioneer. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties in 1886, but he became better known as a writer of short stories. Stories written during his years in India were collected in the anthology The Phantom Rickshaw. Kipling wrote prolifically and achieved fame quickly. In 1889, he returned to England and published Life's Handicap in 1891, and Barrack-Room Ballads which included the poem "Gunga Din." In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Starr Balestier, the sister of an American publisher, and moved to Vermont in the United States. After the death of his daughter Josephine, however, he took his family back to England and settled in Burwash, Sussex. He published The Jungle Book in 1894, Captains Courageous in 1897, Kim in 1901, and Just So Stories in 1902 among many others. He was regarded as an unofficial poet laureate since he refused that and many other honors, among them the Order of Merit. In 1907, Kipling became a Nobel Laureate in Literature. His young son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos during World War I, and, in response, Kipling joined the Imperial War Graves Commission, contributing to the project the Biblical quote: "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" (Sirach 44:14) which was inscribed on Stones of Remembrance over war graves. In 1923, Kipling published The Irish Guards in the Great War, a history of his son's regiment, but his output of fiction and poetry declined. He served as Rector at the University of St. Andrews from 1922 to 1925. In 1926, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, which had been awarded only three times before. Kipling wrote until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than previously. His autobiography, Something of Myself, was published posthumously in 1937. After the death of his widow in 1939, his house in Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a museum dedicated to the author.