America. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English author, journalist, poet, and novelist. His most famous work is "The Jungle Book" (1894), inspiring two Disney adaptations; the 1967 animated feature and the 2016 live-action film starring Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, and Lupita Nyong’o. In 1941, he became the first English-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.