The Project Gutenberg EBook of American Notes, by Rudyard Kipling

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Title: American Notes

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Posting Date: July 21, 2008 [EBook #977]
Release Date: July, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN NOTES ***

Produced by Judith Boss

AMERICAN NOTES

by Rudyard Kipling

With Introduction

Introduction

In an issue of the London World in April, 1890, there appeared the
following paragraph: "Two small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford
sufficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the literary hero of
the present hour, 'the man who came from nowhere,' as he says himself,
and who a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary world."

Six months previous to this Mr. Kipling, then but twenty-four years old,
had arrived in England from India to find that fame had preceded him. He
had already gained fame in India, where scores of cultured and critical
people, after reading "Departmental Ditties," "Plain Tales from the
Hills," and various other stories and verses, had stamped him for a
genius.

Fortunately for everybody who reads, London interested and stimulated
Mr. Kipling, and he settled down to writing. "The Record of Badalia
Herodsfoot," and his first novel, "The Light that Failed," appeared
in 1890 and 1891; then a collection of verse, "Life's Handicap, being
stories of Mine Own People," was published simultaneously in London and
New York City; then followed more verse, and so on through an unending
series.

In 1891 Mr. Kipling met the young author Wolcott Balestier, at that
time connected with a London publishing house. A strong attachment grew
between the two, and several months after their first meeting they
came to Mr. Balestier's Vermont home, where they collaborated on "The
Naulahka: A Story of West and East," for which The Century paid the
largest price ever given by an American magazine for a story. The
following year Mr. Kipling married Mr. Balestier's sister in London and
brought her to America.

The Balestiers were of an aristocratic New York family; the grandfather
of Mrs. Kipling was J. M. Balestier, a prominent lawyer in N