The first biography of Kipling's younger years: his Indian childhood, abandonment in England, and coming of age as a writer.Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his earlyyears there, before being sent to England at the age of six, wherehe was desperately unhappy. Charles Allen's great-grandfatherbrought the sixteen-year-old Kipling back to India to work on Thecivil and military gazette, and thus began young Rudyard's literary career. <br /><br />He arrived in Bombay on October 18, 1882—"a prince enteringhis kingdom"—and for the next seven years, his writing establishedhim as a popular and critical, though sometimes controversial,success. Allen has written a brilliant account of these formativeyears—as a child in India, his unhappy years in England, and hiscoming of age back "home" in Bombay. in this tale of family andempire, Allen traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents,Lockwood and Alice, and reveals what kind of culture the youngwriter was born into and how it would shape his life and writingover the next twenty years.