From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel

First published in book form in 1899, and reissued here in the 1928 Macmillan edition, this two-volume collection contains a series of letters and travel reports originally written for newspapers by the young Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) on his journeys around India, Burma, China, Japan and the United States between 1887 and 1889. The 1907 Nobel Prize winner’s characteristic fluid writing style is already apparent in these funny, poignant and vivid articles and short stories. Providing revealing insights into Kipling’s notions of imperialism and Englishness, the works also reflect the writer’s keen observational powers, and a telling intelligent self-awareness of his own cultural prejudices. Volume 2 contains the remainder of From Sea to Sea, covering the American west coast, Salt Lake City and Chicago, and describing an encounter with Mark Twain as ‘a moment to be remembered.’ This is followed by several short stories including The City of Dreadful Night.