Captains Courageous

This collector-quality edition includes the complete text of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale of a spoiled, self-centered boy unexpectedly thrust into the working crew aboard a Grand Banks fishing schooner in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition.

With an ample 5.5″x8.5″ page size, this Summit Classic edition is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers, proper placement of footnotes, and modern page design that retains the flavor of traditional book printing exemplify the attention to detail given this volume.

“Captains Courageous” was first published in serial form in 1896 while Kipling and his family were living in Vermont and published in novel form the following year. It tells the story of Harvey Cheyne, Jr., the arrogant and utterly self-absorbed son of a railroad tycoon who finds himself overboard during an ocean crossing. Rescued by a fishing schooner working the Grand Banks, Harvey, stranded as a member of the crew for the season, learns a series of lessons about life and manhood in this classic coming-of-age tale.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, novels, travelogues and other commentary who is best known for his tales and poems about British soldiers in India and his children’s stories. The first English-language recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, Kipling declined knighthood and appointment as Poet Laureate of Britain. Kipling’s parents met and courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire before moving to India, and when their son was born in Bombay they recalled the lake in giving him the middle name by which he would be known as a writer.

In keeping with the custom of the times Kipling’s parents sent him to England when he was five – it was a horrifying experience for the boy – and at the age of 16 he returned to India to a job as a writer at a British-run newspaper in Lahore, now in Pakistan, a job arranged by his schoolteacher father. Kipling would always think of himself as “Anglo-Indian”, even though he lived most of his life elsewhere, including a very productive four years spent in Vermont.

Kipling published his first collection of poetry, “Departmental Ditties”, in 1886. Between November 1886 and June 1887 he published an incredible thirty-nine short stories, and in 1888 volumes containing a total of forty-one stories were published in book form. He continued to write throughout his life, at a frenetic pace that did not slow until after World War I, and his work remains popular today. Regarded as a major innovator in the development of the short story, many of his works have become enduring classics and have never been out of print.