Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). English fiction writer and poet. Born in Bombay, India, to English parents, Kipling was sent to England for his education but returned to India to work as a journalist. His poems and short stories about India won him an audience in England, and he settled in London in 1889. When he married Caroline Balestier in 1892, the couple moved to her home state of Vermont. In 1896 Willa Cather claimed to have met Kipling and she described the “46 minutes” of conversation with him as “alone worth” her move to Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly (#0028). In 1899, Cather wrote a column about his career for the Lincoln Courier, in which she noted the irony of Kipling trying to “live a respectable Puritan life in Vermont and be a full-fledged family man,” urging him to “Go back east.” In 1899, he did leave the U.S., but for London, not India, where he remained the rest of his life. McClure’s Magazine published Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the novel Kim (1900-1901), paying him $25,000 for serialization of the latter. When Cather traveled to London on McClure’s business in 1909, she carried a letter of introduction to him, but it is not clear whether she met him again there. Throughout her life Cather expressed enthusiasm for Kipling’s works, which she associated with a spirit of adventure, and her letters make clear that she followed his life and career closely.