On his farm overlooking Brattleboro, Rudyard Kipling wrote the Jungle Book and many of his Just So Stories, and began to draft his great novel, Kim. Christopher Benfey, author If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, answers hard questions about Kipling’s time in this country, including whether he should be considered partly an American writer.

Bio: Christopher Benfey is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age including A Summer of Hummingbirds, which won the 2009 Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, and If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Benfey is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.