Rudyard Kipling

Bombay first. Then an English boarding-house that taught him how a child learns to hate. He went back to India as a very young newspaperman and wrote the station, the barracks, the hill, the lie that keeps an empire running. Plain Tales from the Hills. Soldiers who talk like soldiers. Ballads the music halls stole. Vermont winters, a novel about a boy on the Grand Trunk Road, stories told “just so,” Sussex ghosts, a Nobel he was too young for, a war that took his son. The jungle is one address. He had a whole map. The empire loved him. Later readers have not always. The sentences still cut.