The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, 1894.

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India and that upbringing is front and center in these stories - despite them being written while he was living in Vermont.
The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India. The stories were popular from the start, and have since been adapted in countless ways in print, screen, and other media.


Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children’s books are classics of children’s literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".
In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date.