Rudyard Kipling

Born in British India in 1865, Kipling turned childhood memory and colonial landscape into the raw material of his fiction. The Jungle Books arrived in the 1890s, then Kim, the Just So Stories, and poems like "Mandalay" and "Gunga Din" that made him the most popular writer in Britain by the century's turn. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize at 41, the youngest laureate and the first in English — Henry James called him "the most complete man of genius" he'd ever known. He turned down the Poet Laureateship and a knighthood more than once. When he died in 1936 they buried him in Westminster Abbey, bu…