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Kipling gained an even wider international audience with his stories for children. The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), and Just So Stories (1902) rank among his most famous collections. The two Jungle Books describe the adventures of Mowgli, an Indian child who gets lost in a forest and finds shelter with a family of wolves. Kipling made the jungle seem like a complete political and social world. He also gave each animal a characteristic way of thinking and acting. Mowgli's presence and his human intelligence disturbed the animal society, and a number of years later he returns to live among human beings. The Just So Stories answer with whimsical logic such questions as how the leopard got its spots and how the elephant got its trunk.
Kipling also wrote two popular novels with boys as the heroes. Captains Courageous (1897) tells of a teenager's adventures in America on a New England fishing boat. Kim (1901) is an adventure story about an orphan boy whose Irish parents had died in India. The novel presents a vivid picture of Indian society.
By the early 1900's, Kipling had started to write about people strictly according to their loyalty and usefulness to the British. He went to South Africa to report the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), in which the British won control of two African republics. The stories published in a collection called Traffics and Discoveries (1904), which he wrote after returning from South Africa, show little of his former humanity.
Kipling became increasingly unpopular because many people began to oppose colonialism. Kipling's reputation among critics began to decline after about 1910. Today, however, critics generally agree that Kipling was a great writer who contributed several important works to literature.
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