Kipling was the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist, and Alice Macdonald Kipling and was named after the Staffordshire village of Rudyard where his parents spent their honeymoon. His parents lived much of their lives in British India and had important family connections, including the pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Kipling's uncle by marriage, and Stanley Baldwin, the future British prime minister, a first cousin.
Born in Bombay, where his father was principal of the Jeejeebyhoy Art School, Kipling was brought home to England at the age of six. His parents
… More left him with unfriendly relations in Southsea and returned to India. Kipling became a lonely child. At the United Services College in Devon he was a misfit, frail and short-sighted, spending most of his spare time reading, but in 1882 he returned to India to work as a journalist and quickly began to write successful short stories and verse. Back in England in 1889, he was well established as a writer. In 1891 he travelled to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and visited India for the last time. In 1882 he married Caroline Balestier, an American, and after a honeymoon in Japan they lived for four years in Vermont. The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous and most of Kim were written in the US. In the early twentieth century he wrote several children's books. In 1902, he bought Bateman's, a large country house in East Sussex, England, where he spent the rest of his life. There he continued to write short stories, novels, histories and verse, and in 1907 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Kiplings' only son, John, died in 1915 in the First World War. They also had two daughters, Josephine and Elsie. Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his tomb is next to that of T. S. Eliot. 
