Abstract

Something of an Autobiography

The article focuses on the book "Something of Myself," by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was sometimes an awkward messiah. As the knight-errant of the British middle classes he was slightly uneasy; as the impresario of the Empire he grew pompous. But he was always a skilled and conscientious craftsman, an imaginative artist. This fact, often lost sight of in the tumult and the shouting of his career, is made clear in the opening pages of his autobiography. Here is the account of a gifted young man who was bred by the nostalgia and disease of the Anglo-Indian tradition to ambition, hard work, and daring; who at the age twenty-three, treading on the heels of "the late Mr. Oscar Wilde," confronted literary London with an array of virile talents.