Captains Courageous

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1923, Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal started out as a film extra before landing roles in Captains Courageous and the Andy Hardy films.

As a boy, he remembers devouring young adult titles like “Treasure Island,” “Captains Courageous,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Call of the Wild” and “Swiss Family Robinson.”

In the dream house the couple built in Brattleboro, Kipling wrote “Captains Courageous” and an early draft of “Kim.”

Kipling shaped the thought of William James, with whom he worked out the themes of “Captains Courageous.”

An Americanist who has written very good books about Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, among others, Benfey mostly steers clear of Kipling’s politics, and instead concentrates on a little-known chapter in Kipling’s life: the four years that this outspoken defender of the British Empire spent living just outside Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote some of his best work, including “The Jungle Book” and “The Second Jungle Book,” “Captains Courageous,” and the first draft of “Kim.”