The Light That Failed

Kipling wrote The Light that Failed in 1890, his first triumphant year in London after seven in India as a newspaperman. But despite his precocious success he was restless and unhappy: baffled by the literary world and grievously disappointed in love.

The Light that Failed closely reflects the young Kipling's life at this time. His hero, Dick Heldar, an orphan, has been brought up with Maisie, another orphan, by a guardian.

After roughing it about the world as a 'war artist', Dick comes to London and sudden success... and, by chance, meets and falls in love with Maisie. But Maisie is cold, totally absorbed in her own career as a painter...

Soon Dick's fatal passion is destroying him, and he mysteriously begins to go blind. In desperation, he returns to the masculine world of war, to meet his tragic fate in Egypt, where his finest work was done.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet and novelist. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If-" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". --Wikipedia