Literature Network » Rudyard Kipling

Books: Meetings with triumph and disaster The much-loved books he left behind transcended their author's miserable life, and morose personality.

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 19991002
Author:Tony Gould

Rudyard Kipling

by Andrew Lycett

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 25, 657pp

ALL LIVES are more or less unsatisfactory, written as well as lived. Lives of the living suffer from incompleteness; those of the dead from the fact that all that effort, whether it results in success or failure, leads but to the grave. In the case of creative artists a complicating factor is the relationship between the person and work. Kipling, personally the most reticent of writers, did not want to be "biographised", entreating his readers "not to question other than /The books I leave behind."

Never was there a ...

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