The Jungle Book

A human infant, lost by his parents and adopted by a wolf pack in the Indian jungle, grows up as Mowgli under the guardianship of Baloo the bear, who teaches him the Law of the Jungle, and Bagheera the black panther, who watches over him with a fondness the pack itself never quite extends to a creature not born among them. Shere Khan, a tiger lamed and embittered since birth, has claimed Mowgli as his prey from the day the boy first arrived, and Mowgli's stories build toward a reckoning in which the boy, grown clever enough to use fire, the one thing every jungle animal fears, lures Shere Khan into a narrow ravine and has the village buffalo herd trample him to death, spreading the tiger's hide on the pack's Council Rock afterward. Mowgli's arc across the linked stories ends with his own recognition, forced on him gradually and then all at once, that he is human rather than wolf, and he leaves the jungle pack that raised him to rejoin the world of men, the Law that shaped him no longer quite enough to keep him where he started. Kipling fills out the rest of the collection with stories that share no characters with Mowgli's at all: Rikki Tikki Tavi, a mongoose adopted by an English family in India, wages a fierce and successful war against two cobras threatening the household; a young seal named Kotick searches the world's oceans for a beach safe from human hunters and eventually finds one; and a boy named Toomai earns the right to witness the secret nighttime dance of wild elephants, a sight no human is supposed to see.

Kipling tells each story with the cadence and moral clarity of a fable, animals speaking in their own established codes of law and honor, and the collection reads quickly and vividly even when, as in Mowgli's case, the stories run together into something like a connected life. It has become one of the most enduring texts of childhood reading in English, its jungle Law quoted and adapted for purposes, including the founding vocabulary of the Cub Scout movement, that Kipling himself never anticipated.

An honest note belongs alongside the praise. Kipling wrote from within, and largely in service of, the assumptions of British empire, and later academic readings have argued the collection's order of nation, race, and law reflects that colonial worldview even as scholars uninterested in defending Kipling's politics have still admired the sheer narrative power of how he tells these stories.