Conversations with Some American Authors

Abstract

Somewhere in 1890 or 1891 some books of short stories by a young man named Rudyard Kipling began to find their way into American print, some of them pirated, no doubt, and one afternoon as I was buying my evening paper at a Roxbury’ bookstand (my brother and I were then living on Moreland Street) I saw on the counter a little paper-bound volume called Mine Own People.² I bought it and that night I read it almost without leaving my chair. ‘Here is another local-colour novelist,’ I said to my brother, ‘only in this book the colour is East Indian.’

Roadside Meetings (New York: Macmillan, 1930) pp. 168–74, 405–14.