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Sunday 11 October 2015

The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After a decade in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-a-half years. The Jungle Book was written when Kipling moved to Brattleboro, Vermont in the US in 1892.

All of The Jungle Book stories were published in magazines in 1893-4, before being published by Macmillan & Co. in 1894. The original publications contained illustrations, some by Rudyard Kipling's artist father, John Lockwood Kipling.

The cover from the original edition of The Jungle Book based on art by John Lockwood Kipling

The best-known stories are the three about an abandoned 'man cub' Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The Second Jungle Book, which followed in 1895, includes five further stories about Mowgli.

Because of its moral tone, The Jungle Book came to be used as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts, a junior element of the Scouting movement. Its use was approved by Kipling after a direct petition of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement.

Rudyard Kipling gave the script of The Jungle Book to the nurse who had cared for his first born child. She sold the manuscript for a handsome price and lived in comfort for the rest of her life.

In his old age Sigmund Freud read The Jungle Book many times. He said it was one of those books that affect a person's 'weltanschauung' (Way of looking at the world)

The much loved animated movie version of The Jungle Book was the final film to be personally supervised by Walt Disney himself - he died during production on December 15, 1966 of lung cancer.


The Jungle Book filmmakers originally considered Louis Armstrong for the voice of King Louie, but were worried that choosing a black actor to voice an ape would cause controversy.

In Germany, Disney's The Jungle Book is the biggest movie of all time—the original theater run sold 27.3 million tickets,  nearly 10 million more than second place Titanic's 18.8 million tickets sold.

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