From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel by Rudyard Kipling

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Rudyard Kipling, ‘From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel’.   Kiplings observations are cast in a wry style that permits, as his work often does, different readings. The unsympathetic reader can hear a banal repetition of the patriarchal, racist and imperialist ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century trotted out. (Or even in his characterisation of the Jewish power behind the pedlar in The Face of the Desert a suggestion of something worse.) A more nuanced reading will perceive an amused or wry smile in Kiplings remembering and the human sympathy that infuses all his writing. (US readers should be warned that in Kiplings day the N word was in common use, and he therefore uses it naturally to describe people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.)   Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Mans Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his childrens books are classics of childrens literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting a versatile and luminous narrative gift.   Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.