The Cause of Humanity and Other Stories: Rudyard Kipling’s Uncollected Prose Fictions

Rudyard Kipling’s stories have filled adults and children with wonder for a hundred years. The eighty-six pieces in this collection are mostly unknown to readers of Kipling’s work. Each piece is introduced with the date and publication where it first appeared, attribution, and notes about it. The bulk of these pieces were published originally in two newspapers in India, at which Kipling worked during the late 1800s. He began writing for the first of these when he was only seventeen years old. As with most beginning writers, even those who come from a family of writers as did Kipling, he experiments with a wide variety of topics and forms.

For students of Kipling’s writing, this will open a window into the work of a young, but very talented, writer as he rehearses and practices his craft, finding his way as he develops a style that will become distinctly his own. This is not a book so much for the casual reader as it is for more scholarly pursuits. Editor Thomas C. Pinney has compiled and annotated a terrific collection of Kipling’s early work that will give scholars and students ample grist to comprehend the roots of his writing career.