Books with author Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-a-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont. There is evidence that it was written for his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six, after a rare first edition of the book with a poignant handwritten note by the author to his young daughter was discovered at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010. The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of an abandoned "man cub" Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler. As with much of Kipling's work, each of the stories is preceded by a piece of verse, and succeeded by another.

"Just So Stories" is a collection of 12 short stories for children first published in 1902. They are fantastic stories, with that magic/legend/myth atmosphere of fairy tales, explaining things like the origin of armadillos or how the alphabet was invented. All the stories have a great deal of humour too. I remember loving these stories as a kid, and I'm sure big and small people will like them today.This edition is illustrated by the author, including drop caps. The illustrations' "captions" are delightful to read too ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British Author, born in India, and worldwide famous for works like "The Jungle Book", "Kim" or the poem "If". He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907, which made him the first English language writer to win it.

The Jungle Book key characters are Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves and Sher Khan, biggest tiger in India. As Baloo the sleepy brown bear, Bagheera the cunning black panther, Kaa the python, and his other animal friends teach their beloved “man-cub” the ways of the jungle, Mowgli gains the strength and wisdom he needs for his frightful fight with Shere Khan, the tiger who robbed him of his human family. But there are also the tales of Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose and his “great war” against the vicious cobras Nag and Nagaina; of Toomai, who watches the elephants dance; and of Kotick the white seal, who swims in the Bering Sea.

First published in 1897, “Captains Courageous” follows the adventures of Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled, rich young man who is accidentally washed overboard from a luxury ocean liner and is rescued by the Portuguese captain of a fishing boat and his hard scrabble crew. Kipling, drawing on his own experiences living in Vermont, fills this classic coming of age story with period details of late nineteenth-century American fishing, whaling, and railroad travel. Forced to work for his place on the ship, fifteen-year-old Harvey must overcome his own stubbornness and privileged up-bringing as he learns to survive, and even thrive, in the harsh, demanding, and often dangerous life at sea. Through hard work and discipline, Harvey learns the values of self-reliance and friendship as he becomes a skilled fisherman and an accepted and equal member of the crew. The novel is both a thrilling test of Harvey’s character and an examination of class and privilege in nineteenth-century America. Exhilarating and ultimately redemptive, the novel was heralded by Theodore Roosevelt in his 1900 essay “What We Can Expect of the American Boy” as describing in the “liveliest way just what a boy should be and do.” This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

This is the story of a boy and his weasel, a bird and a snake, India and the British Empire. Rudyard Kipling's dramatic tale, here excerpted from the greater volume of The Jungle Book, is the story of the loyal mongoose, Rikk-Tikki-Tavi, and the lengths to which he must go to protect his adoptive human family. Young readers can once again be captivated by the tale of a mongoose who is taken in by a family of British colonials living in India. Although a few Victorianisms in the text will need to be explained to young readers, the story has held up remarkably well over a century's time. Rikki's fight to defend his family from the menacing cobras Nag and Nagaina remains as suspenseful and emotive as ever. The creatures of the Indian garden come truly alive in Kipling's expert prose--the birds sing out messages of joy and warning; the cobra rears and spreads his sinister hood; the brave mongoose leaps and springs, victorious at last. (cover image courtesy of Gary Scott)

Thirteen classic children’s stories from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Jungle Book. Inspired by the bedtime stories Rudyard Kipling told his own daughter, Josephine, the charming tales in Just So Stories, including “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “How the Camel Got His Hump,” attempt to answer the many questions children have about animals. “Children love these stories as well because of their extraordinary ingenuity and inventiveness. Kipling has an Aesopian understanding of animals, of our dealings with them and our curious interrelatedness, interdependence, how we can learn about our own strange behaviour, our vanities and our foolishness, through them and through our relationship with them.” —Michael Morpurgo, The Guardian “It does for very little children much what the Jungle Books did for older ones. It is artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor. It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy.” —The Atlantic

The Just So Stories for Little Children are a collection written by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Highly fantasised origin stories, especially for differences among animals, they are among Kipling's best known works.The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi (French for "why") or origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's "How Fear Came," included in his The Second Jungle Book (1895). In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes.The Just So Stories typically have the theme of a particular animal being modified from an original form to its current form by the acts of man, or some magical being. For example, the Whale has a tiny throat because he swallowed a mariner, who tied a raft inside to block the whale from swallowing other men. The Camel has a hump given to him by a djinn as punishment for the camel's refusing to work (the hump allows the camel to work longer between times of eating). The Leopard's spots were painted by an Ethiopian (after the Ethiopian painted himself black). The Kangaroo gets its powerful hind legs, long tail, and hopping gait after being chased all day by a dingo, sent by a minor god responding to the Kangaroo's request to be made different from all other animals.Kipling illustrated the original editions of the Just So Stories. Other illustrators of the book include Joseph M. Gleeson.