The first movie of the Mowgli stories was a live-action film directed in 1942 by Zoltan Korda, with Mowgli played by the Indian actor Sabu. Sabu had previously starred in Robert Flaherty’s film “Elephant Boy,” an adaptation of another Jungle Book story, “Toomai of the Elephants.” The Mowgli stories next appeared on screen in 1967, when Disney released the popular animated version, the last film that Walt Disney himself crafted. More recently, director Fumio Kurokawa created more than fifty episodes of a series based on the Mowgli stories for Japanese television.

Another notable permutation of The Jungle Books appears in Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting literature and rituals. Kipling met Baden-Powell, originator of the Boy Scouts, in the 1880s in Lahore, and they became close friends. When Baden-Powell shaped the framework of his Boy Scouting and Cub Scouting movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, he pilfered pieces of Kipling’s stories. The 1908 booklet that introduced the movement, “Scouting for Boys,” included a summary of Kim, and “The Wolf Cub’s Handbook,” composed in 1916 for a junior branch of the Scouts, incorporated a condensed version of the Mowgli stories. The overall conception of the movement—a fraternity that crosses national boundaries and, as Baden-Powell emphasized, promotes “manliness” and “character” in boys—bears a close resemblance to Mowgli’s brotherhood of beasts. Many terms and names from The Jungle Books became a part of Cub Scouting vocabulary: for example, “Law of the Pack,” “Akela,” “Wolf Cub,” “Grand Howl,” “Den,” and “Bagheera.” Moreover, certain ideals expressed in Kim and The Jungle Books are emphasized in all of Baden-Powell’s literature on scouting—for instance, the idea that one must obey a law that governs a brotherhood, the ideal of self-sufficiency, and the ideal of intimate knowledge of the natural world. Kipling himself became directly involved in the movement. He wrote the official Boy Scouts’ song, “A Boy Scouts’ Patrol Song,” the content and cadence of which evokes the Law of the Jungle: “There’s just one law for the Scout / And the first and the last, and the present and the past, / And the future and the perfect is ‘Look Out!’” In 1923 Kipling published Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, the same year that he appeared before 6,000 Cub Scouts at the Imperial Jamboree.

The critical reception of Kipling’s writings has fluctuated dramatically since the publication of The Jungle Books. After the turn of the century, while Kipling continued to receive public honors, including the Nobel Prize in 1907, and while he continued to have a wide and enthusiastic audience of “common readers,” the literary establishment lost interest in him. In 1919, writing in The Athenaeum, T. S. Eliot called him “very nearly a great writer” (Eliot’s essay, along with those by Trilling and Orwell, noted below, are republished in Kipling and the Critics, edited by Elliot Gilbert). Edmund Wilson, who in a 1926 review praised Kipling for his influence on the modernists (“Kipling’s Debts and Credits,” New Republic, October 6, 1926), famously noted in 1941 in The Wound and the Bow that he had been “dropped out of modern literature.” However, Kipling was not only ignored but ruthlessly ridiculed. In the last decades of his life, he was caricatured by Max Beerbohm and mocked in reviews by Virginia Woolf and Robert Graves. Kipling’s politics played a key part in this rejection. After the publication of The Jungle Books, Kipling returned to England, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he increasingly became active in politics. After the death of his daughter Josephine in 1899 and his own nearly fatal illness at the same time, his political views became more rigid. He ardently promoted the British cause in the Boer War, and he remained a passionate advocate of Britain’s imperial ventures, strictly against Indian Home Rule, and an adamant foe of Liberals. Upon Kipling’s death in 1936, George Orwell, in the New English Weekly, called him “the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase.” In the decades that followed, Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination that Kipling “did more than any writer of our time to bring the national idea into discredit”; and Wilson, famously labeling Kipling the writer “that nobody read,” asked, “How was it that the early Kipling, with his sensitive understanding of the mixed population of India, became transformed into the later Kipling, who consolidated and codified his snobberies instead of progressively eliminating them as most good artists do, and who, like Kim, elected as his life work the defense of the British Empire?” (see “The Kipling That Nobody Read”).

Though during Kipling’s lifetime and after critics have been censorious, readers have been consistently laudatory. In Kipling’s obituary, Orwell affirmed that Kipling was still “the most widely popular English writer of our time.” Kipling has remained a much-loved writer. A 1996 BBC poll declared “If” Britain’s favorite poem. Moreover, he remains a fixture in the contemporary popular imagination. Phrases from his prose and poetry, such as “the white man’s burden,” have become commonplaces.

Further, Kipling’s work has recently returned to favor in literary and academic circles. Kipling tales, including a story from The Jungle Books, are included in the widely read Longman Anthology of British Literature. Moreover, many contemporary writers, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Maya Angelou, and Arundhati Roy, have cited Kipling as an important influence. Interestingly, postcolonial writers generating new literary idioms have found in Kipling a powerful resource and source of inspiration, despite his questionable politics. While responses to Kipling remain complex, most readers avow the power of his writing. Salman Rushdie writes that Kipling has the “power” to “infuriate or entrance”; Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul writes of Kipling, in An Area of Darkness: “No writer was more honest or accurate, no writer more revealing of his self or society;” and W.