Word: rudyards
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Writers' reputations are as volatile as dollar stocks. Henry James has been up and down the literary Dow Jones so often that his pants are shiny from the ride, while Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel Prize for beating the drums of imperialism, is read these days-if he is read at all-almost exclusively by children. Sinclair Lewis, the great name of the '20s-and the first American to win the Nobel for literature-is noticed only by spiders on library shelves, and John Dos Passos, who dominated the '30s, is all but forgotten...
Huston and Gladys Hill's adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story set in 19th century India takes some liberties with plot but holds to the original spirit. Kipling himself even shows up as a major character, wittily played by Christopher Plummer. He serves as a stand-in for the story's narrator, a slightly dazed sounding board for the wild ideas and adventures of Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine). These two shopworn soldiers of fortune, after time in Her Majesty's forces, set out on their grandest exploit: to become kings...
Houston-based Aurora Greenway, 49, is a transplanted New Englander and an AstroTurf widow. On the rebound from 24 years of marriage to the pallid Rudyard ("A plant could not have been easier to relate to, or less exciting"), Aurora gaily assembles and mistreats a colorful retinue of suitors including a retired general, an Italian tenor and a bashful oil millionaire who lives in his white Lincoln. She views their constant proposals of marriage skeptically. "Men have never distinguished themselves for sexual fidelity," she says. "The poor things have short attention spans...
Literary revisionists seem to retouch their portraits with the blackest of ink. Charles Dickens and Robert Frost are among those who have appeared as conspicuously darker souls to their later readers. Once upon a time Rudyard Kipling was adored as the bully-boy balladeer of the British Empire, a hearty fellow whose prose as well as his poetry thumped as cheerfully as a barroom song-when, that is, he wasn't spinning animal tales for children. Then, in a famous essay, The Kipling That Nobody Read, Edmund Wilson updated this naïf into a modish vision...
Forbidden Fruit. Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey dismissed Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) as English literature's "performing flea," an acidulous comment that P.G. himself ("Plum" to friends) loved to repeat. But other writers, ranging from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell to Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, recognized that Wodehouse was a good bit more. Waugh, an indisputable master of the comic novel, would reread his favorites from the Wodehouse canon every year, as some people go back for spiritual sustenance to Shakespeare or the Bible. "For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no 'aboriginal calamity...