Just so Stories

The Just So Stories are a collection written by the world famous British author Rudyard Kipling, published in 1902. Highly fantasized origin stories, especially for differences among animals, they are among Kipling's best known works. The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told to 'Effie' [Josephine, Kipling's child]; when the first three were published in a children's magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained: ...in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them, - the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale.'