Born in Bombay in 1865, Rudyard Kipling launched his literary career with <I>Plain Tales from the Hills</I> and, in 1907, became the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Many of the stories in this book were originally published in a Lahore newspaper for which Kipling worked as a journalist. Later, he revised them to re-create as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for English readers. Including "Lispeth," "Beyond the Pale," and "In the Pride of His Youth," this collection, far from being a celebration of empire, instead explores the barriers between races, classes, and sexes and powerfully captures all the tensions and contradictions of colonial life.