Rudyard Kipling has been one of the most loved and the most loathed of English writers. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life is a study of the forces and influences that shaped his work--including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of Empire, and the deaths of two of his children--and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him, but could never ignore him.

In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s.

Kipling affects a wide-eyed innocence, and expresses astonishment at features of American life that differ from his own, not least the freedom (and attraction) of American women. However, he scorns the political machines that made a mockery of American democracy, and while exhibiting the racist attitudes that made him controversial in the 20th century concludes “It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.