The Jungle Book
A boy is raised by wolves and taught the law of the jungle by a bear and a panther, while a tiger waits for the chance to kill him. Kipling wrote the stories for his daughter and set them in a India he had left, using verse and prose together and addressing the reader directly.
The animal society is hierarchical, practical and sometimes brutal, which is part of why children like it and adults keep finding things to argue about. The Mowgli stories are only half the book; the rest are tales of seals, mongooses and elephants, and some of them are better.
Public-domain status
First published in 1894. 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. 236 — 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
- Kim — Rudyard Kipling, 1901
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Mumbai — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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