“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” Kipling famously wrote. But it was in order to meet Twain—Mark Twain—that Kipling said he made his first trip to the United States, from India, at the age of 23 in 1889. He sailed across the Pacific, which meant he met America’s West first, in the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the salmon canneries of the Columbia River, Yellowstone geysers, and Chicago slaughterhouses.* Three thousand miles later, he turned up unannounced on his idol’s doorstep in Elmira, New York. They talked for two hours, Kipling awestruck in the presence of “the oracle”—and Twain impressed by this polymathic young man from India, as outlandish, one of Twain’s daughters remembered, as “a denizen of the moon.”

Kipling had fallen in love with the United States through its literature, from Twain to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose galloping meter and narrative flow would heavily influence Kipling’s own ballads. On his 1889 trip, he fell briefly for an American woman, too, a friend’s sister studying at Wellesley. Arriving in London that autumn, Kipling became fast friends with an American writer and literary agent named Wolcott Balestier, whose sister Carrie he grew close to in turn. Kipling and Balestier teamed up to write an adventure novel, set in Colorado and Rajasthan, that put their cross-continental expertise to the page. Balestier wouldn’t live to see The Naulahka: A Story of East and West published; he died of typhoid in December 1891, just shy of his 30th birthday. Six weeks later, Kipling married Carrie Balestier in a small ceremony in London—Henry James gave away the bride—and the pair sailed for the United States on the first leg of their honeymoon.

Outside Brattleboro, Vermont, the newlyweds bought a parcel of land with a view of Mount Monadnock—a vision, Kipling wrote, of “everything that was helpful, healing, and full of quiet.” They commemorated their purchase by building a snowman on the plot in the shape of the Buddha. In due course followed a baby, Josephine, born in Vermont at the end of 1892. Then came a house, largely designed by Kipling himself. Ninety feet long but just one room wide, a confection of warm, polished hardwood, the home resembled “a houseboat perched on the hillside like Noah’s Ark on Ararat.” They named it Naulakha.

Two of Kipling’s illustrations for the “Just So Stories,” which he started to write for his young daughter during the family’s years in Vermont Culture Club/Getty (x2)

It was at Naulakha that Kipling conjured many of the prose works he’s best known for today. He started to sketch out the novel that became Kim in Vermont, and wrote what he called a “genuine out and out American story,” Captains Courageous, set amid a Gloucester fishing fleet. For Josephine, he began to write a series of animal stories that would later be collected into the volume Just So Stories. The title appears to describe why different animals turned out “just so”—“How the Camel Got His Hump,” “How the Elephant Got His Trunk”—but actually had a more intimate source: Every time Kipling told the stories to his daughter, “Josephine insisted that each story be told exactly the same way—hence, ‘just so.’” Kipling also wrote The Jungle Book at Naulakha, the story of an Indian boy, Mowgli, raised by a family of benevolent wolves. For all that the book taps into Kipling’s experience of India, it also captured something of his sentiments about America as a wild, if nurturing, place. Kipling was convinced, Benfey observes, that “violence was at the molten core of American life,” and that in Vermont (yes, Vermont) “he was living in a lawless jungle.”