R. Kipling - The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, India and died in 1936 in London. He wrote both poetry and prose, but he was best at writing short stories. Some critics call him the greatest short-story writer England has ever had. His finest work include classic animal stories linked by poems for children – The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Kim. Much of his writing was based on his love of nature and animals, and his experience in India which, at the end of the 19th century, was the most important colony in the British Empire. He was able to present in his books a rich picture of colonial life which appealed to the curiosity of people back in England.

In 1907 Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Kipling spent the first six years of his life in Bombay where his father was a teacher in a school of art. His parents belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society and their son had a nurse and his own servant. With them he spent more time than with his father and mother. No wonder then that he spoke Hindi before he mastered English. at the age of six he was taken to England to be educated there. The following years were very unhappy for young Rudyard. His foster was very disagreeable, so he often visited his beloved Uncle Ned – the highly successful 19th century painter.

A friend of Uncle Ned was headmaster of a boarding school in Devon which Kipling attended until he was seventeen. His literary taste was developed there thanks to the headmaster’s well-stocked library. In 1882 Kipling returned to India as a journalist and spent another sever years there. After coming back to England, he married an American and moved to her property in Vermont, but life in the United States didn’t suit them and they returned to England. They spent the rest of their lives in their own house in Sussex.
Kipling’s The Jungle Book is the most known prose. In The Jungle Book there are short stories. The hero of the stories is Mowgli. When he was a little baby, his parents were attacked by Shere Khan, a big tiger. His parents lost him and let him there. Fortunately find him a wolf and bring him home to his wife. A wolf couple, who recently had their own four small wolfs adopt Mowgli and protect him from Shere Khan. Akela, the wolf leader, said that Mowgli needs two other patrons besides the wolf couple. Baloo (the brown bear) and Bagheera (the black panther) sponsor Mowgli. Shere Khan becomes angry that the wolves do not give him Mowgli. Ten or eleven years later, Mowgli has learned to live in the jungle according to Jungle Law. But in this time, Shere Khan had made friends with many of the younger wolves and had persuaded them to hate Mowgli. Bagheera warns Mowgli and tells him to get the Red Flower (fire) from the man village.

Mowgli goes to a man village and is save by Messua and her husband, who believe Mowgli to be their own son who was taken by a tiger many years ago. Mowgli learns the ways and speech of man. But soon Mowgli hears from Grey Brother (one of his wolf brothers) that Shere Khan wants to do revenge. He divides the cattle up into two groups. Mowgli takes one group of cattle on one side of a ravine, and Akela and Grey Brother take charge of the other cattle on the opposite side of the ravine. Mowgli catch Shere Khan in the middle of the ravine and Shere Khan is compressed to death. In this book there is a lot of next short stories till the end but after that Mowgli became the king of the jungle. On the end of this first book he return to people.
In the second book Second Jungle Book Mowgli’s story continued. There are stories about the destruction of the village, in which Mowgli lived or how Mowgli find the king’s treasure.