Beginning with his birth in Bombay, India, this rousing story of the man beloved for his Just-So Stories, The Jungle Book, Puck of Pook's Hill, starts off in a riot of color and sound, and, following the brilliant and variegated career of its subject, sweeps around the world. All of his life Kipling was a traveller. His first long voyage came at the age of three, when he left India for a long visit to England.  This was symbolic; England, in time, came to be the end of all his voyages.

Wherever he went and wherever his imagination wandered, he found romance.  He found it in the forests of India (The Jungle Books), on the coast of Burma (Mandalay), off Newfoundland (Captains Courageous), in engines (The Ship That Found Herself), in the past of England (Puck of Pook's Hill), and in the lives of the men.

The hero of his youth was the British private soldier and he never forgot him, but he discovered many others among the common people as well as in more exalted ranks, including (among his friends) General Booth who founded the Salvation Army and Cecil Rhodes who established Rhodes Scholarships. Social position and class meant nothing to him, so long as a man was doing his job to the utmost of his ability, whether that job was felling a tree in New England or ruling an empire in India. 

During his life he had such fame as few men have ever known, but he knew also what it was like to face an almost unbroken wall of hate, especially after the World War, when he kept saying that it was only the prelude to another and greater, and no one wanted to believe him. Now that so much of what he predicted has come to pass, it is time to look at the man himself: imperious and imperialistic, yet gentle and charming, a lover of strong men and little children, mischievous and full of fun, a great author, a great Englishman, and a great personality.

From the dust jacket