Narrator: In 1889, a brash, 23-year-old reporter from India embarked on a pilgrimage across the United States. He was largely unknown, but he had a singular, audacious goal: to find and meet his literary hero, Mark Twain. The journey was a comedy of errors. He was sent on wild goose chases from Buffalo to Hartford, boarded the wrong trains, and was repeatedly told the great author was unreachable. Yet, he persisted, finally tracking Twain to a secluded house in Elmira, New York. The young man was Rudyard Kipling, and this relentless quest marked the beginning of a decade-long, deeply influential, and ultimately tragic engagement with America. In his book, American Kipling, author Christopher Benfey uncovers this largely forgotten chapter, revealing how the celebrated writer of colonial India attempted to reinvent himself as an American, and how that experience forever shaped his most famous works and his controversial legacy.

Narrator: Rudyard Kipling did not arrive in America as a tourist; he arrived as a man seeking reinvention. Fleeing the rigid class and caste systems of both British India and England, he saw the United States as a land of promise and freedom. His admiration for American writers, especially Mark Twain, was profound. When he finally met Twain in Elmira, the two spoke for hours. Twain was astonished by the young man's command of language, later describing his talk as leaving an impression as "strong and definite" as footprints. This encounter solidified Kipling's ambition. He married an American woman, Caroline Balestier, and after a disastrous honeymoon in Japan that saw their bank fail and their fortune disappear, they settled in Brattleboro, Vermont. Here, Kipling made a conscious effort to become an American writer, drawing inspiration from the landscape and its people, and even announcing his intention to write the Great American Novel.

Narrator: In the hills of Vermont, overlooking Mount Monadnock, Kipling built a unique and deeply personal home he named Naulakha. Designed by Kipling himself, the house was long and narrow, like a ship, with his study positioned at the "bow" so he could survey the world from his desk. This design was no accident. Following the financial ruin and unsettling earthquakes of his trip to Japan, Kipling craved security. Naulakha was his ark, a fortress of stability for his growing family, which soon included his first daughter, Josephine. It was within these walls, during a period of intense creativity and domestic peace, that Kipling produced some of his most iconic work. Far from the jungles of India, he wrote The Jungle Book. And inspired by the Gloucester fishing fleets, he penned the quintessentially American tale, Captains Courageous. For a time, Kipling had found his paradise, a safe harbor for his work and his family.

Narrator: While living in New England, Kipling was aware of the "local color" literary movement, which focused on the quiet, often sterile lives of the region's inhabitants. But Kipling was drawn to something wilder. He found it not in the villages, but in the deep woods and in the stories of wolves. At the time, the prevailing narratives of "wolf-children" in India were colonial tools, portraying native children as feral creatures rescued by benevolent British officials. Kipling subverted this entirely. In The Jungle Book, he created a believable and sympathetic wolf family who adopts the human child Mowgli not as a savage, but as a son. He gave the jungle its own "Law," a complex social and moral code. In doing so, Kipling created a new and enduring myth, one born not in India, but from his imagination in the snowy hills of Vermont, a world away from the polite society of Boston.

Narrator: Kipling's American idyll was not immune to the political turmoil of the Gilded Age. He formed a close friendship with the equally energetic Theodore Roosevelt, who admired Kipling's concept of the "strenuous life." However, their shared belief in Anglo-Saxon dominance soon pulled Kipling into a controversy that would tarnish his name for generations. As the United States debated whether to annex the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, Kipling wrote a poem intended to spur the nation into action. Titled "The White Man's Burden," it was a direct appeal to America to take up the mantle of empire, framing colonization as a difficult but noble duty to "civilize" the "sullen peoples" of the world. The poem became an anthem for imperialists, including Roosevelt, but it also cemented Kipling's reputation as a jingoistic and racist apologist for empire, a label that haunts his legacy to this day.

Narrator: Kipling's American dream unraveled with shocking speed. A bitter financial dispute with his ne'er-do-well brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, escalated into a public feud and a humiliating courtroom spectacle. The man who craved privacy was now tabloid fodder, and the small-town resentments of Brattleboro turned against the famous outsider. The political climate had also soured; the Venezuela border dispute had stirred anti-British sentiment, and Kipling felt his adopted country turning on him. The final, devastating blow came in 1899. While visiting New York, both Kipling and his beloved daughter Josephine fell gravely ill with pneumonia. Kipling survived, but Josephine did not. The loss was absolute. He could no longer bear the country that he associated with his deepest grief. He sold Naulakha and left America, never to return. He famously confessed, "There are only two places in the world where I want to live, Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either."

Narrator: Long after Kipling departed, his work continued to cast a long and complicated shadow over America, most notably during the Vietnam War. As Christopher Benfey reveals in the epilogue, Kipling's novel Kim became a kind of unofficial field manual for CIA operatives. Edward Lansdale, a key figure in American counterinsurgency, advised his agents to study the book's methods of espionage and cultural immersion. More consequentially, a line from a lesser-known Kipling poem was dangerously misinterpreted at the highest levels of government. The original line, from his novel The Naulahka, reads: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East," a warning against trying to cheat or deceive Asian cultures. Policymakers, however, repeatedly misquoted it as a warning against trying to hurry the East. This fatal misreading—from hustle to hurry—was used to justify a slow, drawn-out war strategy, demonstrating how Kipling's ghost, and the misinterpretation of his complex ideas, continued to influence American imperial adventures decades later.

Narrator: American Kipling reveals that Rudyard Kipling's decade in the United States was not a mere footnote in his life, but the central, defining chapter. It was in America that he found love, fatherhood, and the creative sanctuary to write his most timeless stories. It was also in America that he confronted the complexities of political power and suffered the most profound loss of his life, a tragedy that drove him away forever.

The book challenges us to look beyond the one-dimensional caricature of Kipling as the "Bard of Empire." He was a man of deep and troubling contradictions: an imperialist who sought refuge in a republic, a writer of the Indian jungle who found his muse in the Vermont snow. His work remains a powerful, and at times perilous, force in the world, a testament to a legacy far more complex and American than we ever imagined.