The fourth volume of Rudyard Kipling's letters, now collected and edited for the first time, continues the story of his life from the end of the Edwardian era through the Great War, a crisis in Kipling's life as well as in that of the world. The years before the war saw the publication of Rewards and Fairies and Songs from Books. In politics, the great issue was Irish home rule and the fate of Ulster. At the outbreak of the war Kipling devoted himself to the struggle. He wrote patriotic verse, made recruiting speeches, and traveled as a correspondent to the French and Italian fronts. He published no new fiction, only what he wrote as correspondent and propagandist: France at War, The Fringes of the Fleet, and The Eyes of Asia. In 1915 his only son, John, was killed in the Battle of Loos; at the same time Kipling began to suffer from the undiagnosed ulcer that would torment him for the rest of his life. His last volume of poems, The Years Between, published in 1919, embodies the suffering and bitterness of these years.

The most popular author of his day and a paradox who was both an assertive British imperialist and a man of sensitivity and wide reading, Rudyard Kipling is best remembered now as the author of The Jungle Book, the Just-So Stories, and Kim. Fully annotated, volumes 5 and 6 conclude the publication of Kipling's letters, a heroic effort that began with the publication of volume 1 in 1990.

The most popular author of his day and a paradox who was both an assertive British imperialist and a man of sensitivity and wide reading, Rudyard Kipling is best remembered now as the author of The Jungle Book, the Just-So Stories, and Kim. Fully annotated, volumes 5 and 6 conclude the publication of Kipling's letters, a heroic effort that began with the publication of volume 1 in 1990.

Kipling's letters, never before collected and edited and largely unpublished, are now presented in an annotated edition based on the more than 6,000 letters preserved in public and private collections all over the world. Planned in an edition of four volumes, the Letters reveal Kipling with a fullness and immediacy of detail unmatched by any other source. The first two volumes present the first half of Kipling's life, down to the end of the nineteenth century. They show the remarkable transformation of the young schoolboy into the seasoned Indian journalist, and the even more remarkable transformation of the Indian journalist into the famous writer, the most dazzling literary success of the 1890s. Kipling's hard years of apprenticeship, his restless travels and eager encounters with cities and men, his triumphant struggles in the literary wars, are all vividly set forth. The Letters also take Kipling through his marriage and the births of his children, through the mingled happiness and distress of his American years, to the tragedy of his daughter's death at the very highest moment of his literary fame.

This fifth volume of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, fully annotated, is one of six volumes which form the first comprehensive publication of Kipling's letters. This volume focuses on Kipling's life through the post-war decade of the 1920s.