If
The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years
-
- USD 3.99
-
- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
A New York Times Notable Book of 2019
A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature
At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world. At the height of his fame in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner. His influence on major figures—including Freud and William James—was pervasive and profound. But in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny. In If, scholar Christopher Benfey brings this fascinating and complex writer to life and, for the first time, gives full attention to Kipling's intense engagement with the United States—a rarely discussed but critical piece of evidence in our understanding of this man and his enduring legacy.
Benfey traces the writer’s deep involvement with America over one crucial decade, from 1889 to 1899, when he lived for four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, and sought deliberately to turn himself into a specifically American writer. It was his most prodigious and creative period, as well as his happiest, during which he wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. Had a family dispute not forced his departure, Kipling almost certainly would have stayed. Leaving was the hardest thing he ever had to do, Kipling said. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he lamented, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.”
In this fresh examination of Kipling, Benfey hangs a provocative “what if” over Kipling’s American years and maps the imprint Kipling left on his adopted country as well as the imprint the country left on him. If proves there is relevance and magnificence to be found in Kipling’s work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Benfey, a Mount Holyoke English professor, briskly and enjoyably recounts Rudyard Kipling's romance with the United States. While often associated with India, Kipling's birthplace and early home, he actually wrote two of his most famous depictions of that country, The Jungle Book and Kim (in its first draft), while living in Brattleboro, Vt., from 1892 to 1896. Benfey asserts that Kipling's sense of America as a "lawless jungle" informed the first book's depiction of a human boy being raised in an actual jungle, and that much of Kipling's philosophy about character (expressed in his famous poem "If") sprang from his admiration for such American writers as Mark Twain, whom Kipling sought out on his first American visit, in 1889. Kipling also exerted his own influence on Americans, perhaps most significantly in 1899, when Henry Cabot Lodge used Kipling's imperialist poem "The White Man's Burden" to convince his fellow U.S. senators to vote for occupying the Philippines. However, Benfey is concerned more with the personal than the political, emphasizing that the poem's publication coincided with the death of Kipling's American-born daughter, Josephine, during a visit by the Kiplings (then living in England) to Manhattan, a shattering loss that conclusively cut Kipling's American ties. This is an admirably concise account of a complex and pivotal period in a famed writer's career.
