KIPLING; A Selection of His Stories and Poems / Illustrated by Richard M. Powers

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1956. Book Club Edition. Cloth. Very Fine/Very Fine. Richard M. Powers. 2 vols, 8vos, black cloth with gold lettering on spine, Mylar-protected pictorial and colorful dust jackets--and title pages--with numerous painted scenes of India by Richard Powers (unclipped and spendid),vol. I: ix + 531 pages & vol. II: vii + 505 pages. Two volumes of Kipling's best stories in splendid overall condition and extra special, colorful dust jackets expressive of India. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If-" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift." Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date.--Wikipedia Exceptional condition internally and externally. Slight loss to upper right corner of dust jacket in volume two with the lovely Indian woman on its cover. For those who sometimes look askance at "Book Club Editions," kindly remember that from the large print runs, most are usually destroyed (especially their often fine dust jackets), and that such editions represent genuine rarities (often of special bibliographic interest)--especially if in superior condition or with noteworthy editors, as is the case here. "Our greatest story writer"--Somerset Maugham.