Program

Research Programs: Public Scholars

Period of Performance

9/1/2016 - 8/31/2017

Funding Totals

$50,400.00 (approved)
$50,400.00 (awarded)


Kipling's Ark: The Making and Unmaking of an American Writer

FAIN: FZ-250278-16

Christopher Benfey
Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA 01075-1423)

A study of the Nobel-prize-winning British writer Rudyard Kipling’s engagement with the United States, especially during four years he spent living in Vermont. By focusing on Kipling's "American decade" (1889-99), the book will provide a fresh perspective on Kipling's life and works, as well as on the American Gilded Age. 

From 1890 to 1920 and beyond, Rudyard Kipling was the most popular writer in the world, winning a Nobel Prize in 1907, but his reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. “Kipling’s Ark: The Making and Unmaking of an American Writer” seeks to address a conspicuous lacuna in efforts to make sense of Kipling’s varied career. Kipling’s intense engagement with the United States—on a personal, political, and aesthetic level—has never received the attention it deserves. The central focus of my book is Kipling’s American decade, extending from 1889 to 1899, with special attention to his four-year sojourn in Vermont. Seven individual chapters, blending narrative with essayistic elaboration, will address key moments and encounters during the decade, while also offering a fresh perspective—Kipling’s own—on the American Gilded Age, the subject of four previous trade books I have published.





Associated Products

Rudyard Kipling in America (Article)
Title: Rudyard Kipling in America
Author: Christopher Benfey
Abstract: udyard Kipling used to be a household name. Born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father taught at an arts school, and then exiled as a boy to England, he returned to India as a teen-ager, and quickly established himself as the great chronicler of the Anglo-Indian experience. He was Britain’s first Nobel laureate in literature, and probably the most widely read writer since Tennyson. People knew his poems by heart, read his stories to their children. The Queen wanted to knight him. But in recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now. Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/rudyard-kipling-in-america
Publisher: The New Yorker

Taking Another Look at the Author of 'The White Man's Burden' (Article)
Title: Taking Another Look at the Author of 'The White Man's Burden'
Author: Christopher Benfey
Abstract: White men’s burdens are not much in vogue these days; it would be difficult to think of a writer as firmly out of fashion as Rudyard Kipling. The very name seems to waft our way on a plume of cigar smoke. It was an oddity even in Kipling’s time. “Is it a man or a woman?” an early publisher asked, on first hearing it. (Kipling’s parents had fallen in love in Staffordshire, at a picnic on Lake Rudyard. One wonders about their second child, known as Trix.)
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/books/review/if-christopher-benfey-kipling.html
Format: Newspaper
Publisher: The New York Times

If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years (Book)
Title: If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years
Author: Christopher Benfey
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=073522143X
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (073522143X)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 073522143X