First US edition
KIPLING, Rudyard. Captains Courageous. New York: The Century Co. 1897.
8vo. Original pictorial green cloth, blocked in black, red and gilt; top edge gilt; 21 full page illustrations by I.W. Taber; contemporary ownership inscription and name stamp on front endpaper; pp. viii, [2], 323; gift inscription in pencil to front fly leaf; cloth a little marked and dark spotted, front inner hinge reinforced; a good copy.
First US trade edition.
As in Kipling's classic novel The Jungle Book in which a young Mowgli finds himself astray in a new environment, Captains Courageous follows the evolution in character of Harvey Cheyne, washed overboard from an ocean liner into the trusting hands of the We're Here fishing boat.
In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling writes of his intention with the novel as "I wanted to see if I could catch and hold something of a rather beautiful localised American atmosphere that was already beginning to fade". Rudyard Kipling would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
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