The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is a collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling first published in 1894. Rudyard Kipling was born to a British family living in India and spent the first six years of his life there before being sent to England for schooling. Kipling’s works reflect his colonialist upbringing and support for British imperial rule over India, as well as ideas of European racial and cultural superiority developed in the Victorian Era. While the seven stories in The Jungle Book focus primarily on animal characters, Kipling uses the animal world allegorically to comment upon and critique aspects of human society. The first three stories in the collection tell the story of Mowgli, a human child raised by Indian wolves and trained by jungle animals such as Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. These stories were adapted into a film of the same name by Walt Disney in 1967.

The guide refers to the edition published in 1910 by The Century Co. 

Content Warning: This guide quotes stigmatizing language about mental illness and contains discussions of racism.

Story Summaries

Each story in The Jungle Book focuses on the world of animals, primarily Indian animals, and each story ends with an

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