The first reaction to Kipling's autobiography was summed up by one wit among the reviewers, who said that it was not in fact Something of Myself but Hardly Anything of Myself. He might have gone on to say that not only was it thin on the facts of Kipling's life, it often had them wrong as well. One would suppose that these two striking characteristics of the book, its incompleteness and its unreliability, would be fatal to its appeal as an autobiography, yet that is not so: the book is a highly characteristic example of a fully formed literary master's work – it is, in fact, Kipling's final work – and it has all the artistic interest inseparable from that fact. And, within the limits of its carefully determined reticence, it provides a fascinating view of a remarkable life.

With such a book, however, an editor has the opportunity to be particularly useful to the reader: he can correct details that have gone wrong; he can supplement passages that fail to provide a full account; and, most important, he can provide a background against which the selection, emphasis, lighting, and colors of Kipling's self-portrait can be better understood. I have tried to make myself useful in these ways in producing this edition.

Something of Myself was not Kipling's only autobiographical writing; much of his fiction has strong autobiographical elements in it – Stalky & Co., for instance – and many of his articles, essays, and speeches are partly or largely autobiographical.