If: the untold story of Kipling's American years

"Rudyard Kipling once towered over not just English literature, but indeed the entire literary world. In 1907, at just forty-two, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner and the first in the English language. Today, however, when he is read, if indeed he is read at all, it is regarding the history of colonial India, his birthplace and the setting of some his most famous work, and to a lesser extent England, his ancestral home. But, in fact, Kipling's most prodigious and creative period took place in America, which was also his preferred home. It was here, on the crest of a Vermont hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, that Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. And here where his ascent to fame was most rapid. Almost certainly, he would have stayed in the United States, understanding himself not just to be an American but a particularly American artist, had a family dispute not forced his departure in 1896. Steeped in the history of the Gilded Age, Christopher Benfey brings to life in fresh revelatory detail American Kipling, tracing a great but today deeply unfashionable writer's intense personal, political, and artistic involvement with the United States. He offers an overdue reminder of Kipling's extraordinary influence in his own lifetime, as well as a compelling portrait of the American artists and writers he both influenced and was influence by, including William James and, in particular, Mark Twain--who Kipling sought out specifically as kindred spirit when he first arrived, and before long had eclipsed in literary fame and critical estimation. Intertwining biography, criticism, and history, IF restores judiciously a true story of great American artistry"--