A boy is taken from the world he was born into and delivered to strangers. He learns their language better than his own, submits to their law, is fed and taught and even loved. He becomes the most gifted creature in the household. And then, at the end, he is told to leave — because whatever else he is, he is not one of them, and never was. He goes back to his own kind and discovers that he does not fit there either.

That is the plot of the most beloved children's story of the twentieth century. It is also, almost detail for detail, what happened to the man who wrote it.

Rudyard Kipling was five when he was removed from India and left with paid strangers in an English seaside town for six years. He had thought and dreamed in one language and was ordered to speak another at dinner. He said afterward, with the flat cheer of a man describing a chemical reaction, that the lying he learned in self-defense was the foundation of his literary career. Two decades later, in a room seven feet by eight in a Vermont winter with the snow level with the window sill, he built a jungle out of memory and put a stranded boy in the middle of it.

Boris Kriger reads The Jungle Books as the confession Kipling never intended to write, and follows the consequences through an entire life. Here is the Law of the Jungle as the only complete political theory he ever set down — a working constitution, placed in a book for children, by a man who could describe a functioning order only where he was permitted to design one from nothing. Here is the lodge, the regiment, and the empire as successive attempts to find the pack again. Here is the strange second career of a writer who refused a knighthood and the Laureateship and then became the anonymous author of the words on war graves across the world. And here is the son who went into the line at Loos and never came out, leaving his father to spend twenty years choosing language for other people's dead.