Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads

RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936), English short-story writer, poet and novelist, the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize (1907). His worldwide popularity was (at one time) phenomenal. And still today, apart from the issue of imperialism, sophisticated readers recognize in Kipling an extraordinary ear for language, literary and vernacular, and a precise use of spare, vivid imagery.