Rudyard Kipling, the first writer in English to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been celebrated (and damned) as the “Bard of Empire,” renowned for poems such as “Gunga Din,” celebrating the pluck of the British Tommy fighting for his queen, and “Recessional,” warning Queen Victoria’s people that their sway over “palm and pine” might come to an end. Much less well known is that Kipling married an American, that his children were born in a house still standing in Brattleboro, Vermont, and that his interest in the fate and fortune of his temporary home country was intense, a love-hate relationship that found him corresponding with Theodore Roosevelt -- to whom he sent “The White Man’s Burden” before its publication in 1899—and, not fifteen years later, with other prominent Americans whom he implored to join forces with the Allies in World War One. Remarkably, that influence lasted beyond the author’s death in 1936, when Winston Churchill, another Briton seeking the United States’ joinder in a later world war, wooed Franklin Roosevelt with copies of unpublished Kipling poems. Our speaker will explore this long and fateful relationship of the Bard of the British Empire with the rising American empire, which he admired in a contested way his whole life, and toward which he aimed his poetic skill in a grand strategy to garner support for the older, threatened empire. David Alan Richards is a retired real estate attorney who practiced in Manhattan, where his projects included the air rights for Trump Tower, the sale of the AT&T building, the television broadcasters’ antenna at the World Trade Center, and the 13-year-long donation of the High Line to New York City for a park. Mr. Richards served as the chair of the Real Property Section of the American Bar Association, which published his book on commercial leasing in New York City, and chair of the Anglo-American Real Property Institute. He graduated from Yale College and the University of Cambridge, with degrees in American and European history, and then Yale Law School. His collection of the first editions, manuscripts, and letters of Kipling, now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, is the world’s largest. He presently serves as the Chair of the Yale Library Associates, and on the Yale Librarian’s Development Council; he is also his college class’s representative to the Yale Alumni Association. In 2010, the British Library published his Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography, now the standard reference cited by Sotheby’s, Christies’, and the leading antiquarian book dealers here and abroad. He is also a vice president of the London-based Kipling Society, in whose Journal he has published several articles about the writer. The catalogue of his collection’s exhibition at the Beinecke Library in 2007, Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind was published by Yale University Press that year. In 2017, Pegasus Press published Mr. Richards’s Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies, and his next book, I Give These Books: The History of the Yale University Library, 1656-2016, will be published next year. Last January, Mr. Richards was honored in the Wall Street Journal as one of sixteen winners of the Marquis Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement Awards for 2020-2021.