The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories

These five stories, written by the young Rudyard Kipling in India, deal with ghosts and terrors of many kinds. In 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw', an Englishman who cruelly ended an affair is haunted on the roads of Simla by the woman's ghost in her rickshaw; in 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes', an engineer falls into a crater in the sand where people believed dead are trapped in a horrible community; 'The Man Who Would Be King' tells of two adventurers who make themselves kings in remote Kafiristan; and in 'The Finest Story in the World', a London clerk seems to remember his past lives.

Kipling published the collection in 1888 in a series of cheap paperbacks sold at Indian railway stations, when he was twenty-two. 'The Man Who Would Be King' also has its own page in the library: The Man Who Would Be King. His first stories of Anglo-Indian life are Plain Tales from the Hills.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, sent to England at five to an unhappy foster home, and returned to India at sixteen to work as a journalist in Lahore. His stories of Anglo-Indian life made him famous in London in his twenties.

The Jungle Book, written in Vermont, Kim and Just So Stories became classics, and in 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize. His poem 'If—' is still widely quoted, though his support for empire makes him a controversial figure today. His only son was killed in the First World War.