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Today is the birthday of Rudyard Kipling, the English writer and poet.

On Answers.com, they say:

Rudyard Kipling is the author of The Jungle Book and other British-flavored tales of the Indian subcontinent. Kipling was born in India to British parents, but spent much of his childhood at school in England before returning to India in his teens. His collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) was full of colorful, dusty, sing-song poems told from the point of view of the common British soldier, including the popular poem “Gunga Din.” The Jungle Book (1894) was a collection of fictional stories about the wilds of India, many of them about Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. It was followed by The Second Jungle Book in 1895 and was the basis for the popular 1967 Disney animated film. … Among his most popular poems are If (“IF you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”), Mandalay (“… An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!”). His 1897 book Captains Courageous [made into a film featuring Spencer Tracy] was set among the fishing fleets of New England, and Kim (1901) in the Himalayas. Just So Stories (1902) was a collection of whimsical African tales, including “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “The Elephant’s Child.”

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A prior blog post contains the poem “If,” and another contains a quote from one of Kipling’s poems.