Rudyard Kipling’s creations in verse and prose are among the most familiar in the English language. It would be difficult to shield a child in any Anglophone country from Mowgli’s exploits among the wolves, or from an explanation of how the leopard got his spots. Many teenagers are still exposed to the hammering exhortations of “If—,” recently voted the most popular poem in Great Britain:

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too...

If you can fulfill all these conditions, Kipling concludes, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

And yet—this is not widely known, even in New England—Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, and many of his most familiar poems on the crest of a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view across the river valley of Mount Monadnock “like a gigantic thumbnail,” Kipling wrote, “pointing heavenward.” It is startling to learn that Kipling, who was born in Bombay and married a young woman from Brattleboro, hoped to remain in the United States. Over the years, he would presumably have become more and more of an American writer—English friends marveled at his American accent—just as the Polish writer Joseph Conrad and the American writer Henry James (who gave the bride away at Kipling’s wedding) became increasingly English in their own adopted country.

Kipling’s four-year sojourn in Vermont, from 1892 to 1896, was a remarkably productive period for this versatile poet and short-story writer, and established patterns, aesthetic and political, for much that came later. Kipling had his reasons for working hard. The leisurely around-the-world honeymoon that he and his wife, Carrie, had planned—with visits to India, where Kipling had first worked as a newspaperman, and to Samoa, to pay their respects to his idol, Robert Louis Stevenson—was aborted in Yokohama by two earthquakes: one actual, the other an international bank failure that wiped out Kipling’s savings. Carrie was pregnant and Kipling was broke. “The night cometh,” his father ominously wrote over their mantelpiece, “when no man can work.”

Kipling, who turned thirty in 1895, would likely have stayed in Brattleboro had not a bitter quarrel with his drunken lout of a brother-in-law put an abrupt end to his New England idyll. The Kiplings had built a beautiful Indian-style bungalow high above the Connecticut River (it is still there), and had hired Carrie’s boorish brother, Beatty Balestier, to care for the meadows and build a tennis court (also still there). Their quarrel over money ended in physical threats and a histrionic court hearing attended by so many spectators and reporters that the proceedings were moved to the largest assembly room in the town hall.