This collector-quality volume includes the complete text of Rudyard Kipling's timeless collection of classic tales in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a generous 6"x9" page size, this Summit Classic edition is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers and footers and modern design and page layout exemplify the attention to detail given this volume. "The Jungle Book," published in 1894, is a collection of tales that have delighted readers, young and old, for generations. First published as short stories in magazines in 1893 and 1894 and written during the years that Kipling lived in Vermont, the stories are most commonly seen as fables, using personified animal characters to teach moral lessons. The tales have also been interpreted as allegories commenting on the society, culture and politics of the times, and this interpretation is not difficult to find in Kipling's stories and verses. The best-known "Jungle Book" characters are Mowgli, the man-cub raised by wolves, and his friends and enemies, Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, Kaa, an Indian python and Shere Khan, a tiger with a taste for man-cub and a long memory with which to hold a grudge. But also in these pages the reader will find fierce little Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the cobra-hunting mongoose, Toomai, the little boy who has seen, deep in the jungle, what no man has ever seen, and a host of supporting characters, both human and animal. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, novels, travelogues and other commentary who is best known for his tales and poems about British soldiers in India and his children's stories. The first English-language recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, Kipling declined knighthood and appointment as Poet Laureate of Britain. Kipling's parents met and courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire before moving to India, and when their son was born in Bombay they recalled the lake in giving him the middle name by which he would be known as a writer. In keeping with the custom of the times Kipling's parents sent him to a boarding house in England when he was five - it was a horrifying experience for the boy - and at the age of 16 he returned to India to a job as a writer at a British-run newspaper in Lahore, now in Pakistan, a job arranged by his schoolteacher father. Kipling would always think of himself as "Anglo-Indian," even though he lived most of his life elsewhere, including a very productive four years spent in Vermont. Kipling published his first collection of poetry, "Departmental Ditties," in 1886. Between November 1886 and June 1887 he published an incredible thirty-nine short stories, and in 1888 volumes containing a total of forty-one stories were published in book form. He continued to write throughout his life, at a frenetic pace that did not slow until after World War I, and his work remains popular today. Regarded as a major innovator in the development of the short story, many of his works have become enduring classics and have never been out of print.