"The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling. Shows the relevance of the children's stories to adults

Essay by Chris RelucioCollege, UndergraduateA+, June 1996

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Children's stories are juvenile tales that can only be read by children or others with child-like minds. They are solely for entertainment and they should not be read by adults. This is how a lot of people envision children's stories. This vision is completely false. Many children's stories deal with adult matters. The real difference is the author is skillful enough to be able to simplify it and put it into terms easy enough for a child to understand. One author who is known for this is Rudyard Kipling. He has written many short stories in his life. The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and the Just So Stories are all great collections of some of the best children's stories ever written. Rudyard Kipling was very skilled in four literary devices that appear in almost everyone of his children's stories. These devices are regionalism, personification, allegory, and parables.

Rudyard Kipling skillfully uses these common devices to teach a lesson and transport the reader from his or her world into a world where animals rule and law prevails.

Kipling developed these skills through long years of writing short stories and novels. His life lessons mirror many of the lessons in his children's stories. His family's

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deep roots in the arts are directly responsible for his broad base of knowledge in literature.

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1965 in Bombay, India. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, had moved there for a job as an art teacher at the Bombay School of Art. His mother, Alice (Macdonald), was the daughter of a Methodist minister and her family was well known in England for their talents in art and literature. When Kipling was six years old his parents sent him to England for schooling. This practice was...