Rudyard Kipling was a writer whose star rose suddenly, then fell slowly, his repute now in such doubt that award-winning writer Christopher Benfey was advised against trying to “rehabilitate” him. Fortunately, he did not heed that advice, and this fascinating biography is the result.

Living in India in what he thought of as rather idyllic circumstances, at age five Kipling was sent to England to be raised by a professional foster family. The shock cut deep. Kipling later spoke of it as a kind of imprisonment, forcing him to reveal nothing of his treatment lest he be punished, yet accepting it as children do, as what was required. Later, his stories of “lost boys” like Mowgli in THE JUNGLE BOOK (who was raised by wolves) and the hero of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS (a rich boy forced to live like an ordinary sailor) recall this sense of alienation and determination. Both books were written while Kipling lived in the US, reflecting perhaps his sense of freedom to tell, finally, the truth about his upbringing.

"Benfey...has brought to light and deftly connected many lesser-known facts about Kipling, his contemporaries (including Teddy Roosevelt), and his secret longing to become a great American writer."

Kipling came to the US with his wife, American Carrie Balestier, who he had married days after hearing of the death of her brother Wolcott, with whom he had composed THE NAULAHKA, a winding novel that melded imagery from India with a very American setting. Possibly, Kipling had been enamored of Wolcott, and courting his sister was the best expression of those feelings. He and Carrie were in the midst of a storybook honeymoon when they learned that his bank had collapsed. Financially desperate and with a baby on the way, they found a haven in Vermont, near Brattleboro, eventually building a stately home named for that first novel.

Benfey, the Andrew F. Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College with a particular focus on the American Gilded Age, has brought to light and deftly connected many lesser-known facts about Kipling, his contemporaries (including Teddy Roosevelt), and his secret longing to become a great American writer. Forced to leave the US after about 10 years, Kipling became an esteemed English literary voice, but the American links lingered. Interestingly, his novel KIM, conceived during his American sojourn, became required reading for CIA agents during the Vietnam War.

Though buried beside Tennyson and Chaucer, Kipling’s light dimmed in the new world era, with works like “The White Man’s Burden” making his name anathema. Yet, Benfey points out, his greatest stories are still the basis for popular remakes. And there is much to be discerned about the radical upheavals in current American culture from Kipling’s complex American engagement, which Benfey regards as “a quest for a lost paradise.”