Born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865, Rudyard Kipling, the author of a dozen contemporary classics, was educated in England. He returned, however, to India and took a position on the staff of "The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette," writing for the Indian press until about 1890, when he went to England, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of a short sojourn in America. Even while he was still in India he achieved a popular as well as a literary success with his dramatic and skilful tales, sketches and ballads of Anglo-Indian life. _Soldiers Three_ (1888) was the first of six collections of short stories brought out in "Wheeler's Railway Library." They were followed by the far more sensitive and searching _Plain Tales from the Hills_, _Under the Deodars_ and _The Phantom 'Rikshaw_, which contains two of the best and most convincing ghost-stories in recent literature. These tales, however, display only one side of Kipling's extraordinary talents. As a writer of children's stories, he has few living equals. _Wee Willie Winkie_, which contains that stirring and heroic fragment "Drums of the Fore and Aft," is only a trifle less notable than his more obviously juvenile collections. _Just-So Stories_ and the two _Jungle Books_ (prose interspersed with lively rhymes) are classics for young people of all ages. _Kim_, the novel of a super-Mowgli grown up, is a more mature masterpiece. Considered solely as a poet (see Preface) he is one of the most vigorous and unique figures of his time. The spirit of romance surges under his realities. His brisk lines conjure up the tang of a countryside in autumn, the tingle of salt spray, the rude sentiment of ruder natures, the snapping of a banner, the lurch and rumble of the sea. His poetry is woven of the stuff of myths; but it never loses its hold on actualities. Kipling himself in his poem "The Benefactors" (from _The Years Between_ [1919]) writes: Ah! What avails the classic bent And what the cultured word, Against the undoctored incident That actually occurred? Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His varied poems have finally been collected in a remarkable one-volume _Inclusive Edition_ (1885-1918), an indispensable part of any student's library. This gifted and prolific creator, whose work was affected by the war, has frequently lapsed into bombast and a journalistic imperialism. At his best he is unforgettable, standing mountain-high above his host of imitators. His home is at Burwash, Sussex. GUNGA DIN