Just So Stories
Twelve stories explaining how the camel got its hump, how the leopard got its spots and how the alphabet was invented, each with a poem attached. Kipling wrote them for his daughter and read them aloud, and the rhythms are designed for a voice rather than a page.
The stories are nonsense, but the nonsense is precise and the language is deliberately playful. Some of the imperial assumptions are visible, and parents may want to talk about them. The best of the tales, The Elephant's Child, is a small masterpiece of comic escalation.
Public-domain status
First published in 1902. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, so this work has been free to republish there since 2007.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2781 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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