The Corbett Papers – Ed. Akshay Shah & Stephen Alter

Description

Jim Corbett, the famous naturalist-hunter, wrote a series of bestsellers about his experiences with wildlife in the jungles of North India. Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944), his first book, has sold more than 4 million copies. Few people know that some of the stories in that book were earlier published in a slender volume titled Jungle Stories, only a hundred copies of which were printed by Corbett for friends in his hometown, Nainital. The entire text of this privately published and long vanished book is reproduced here, along with papers that Corbett’s first biographer, D.C. Kala, acquired during his research.

The Corbett Papers also includes the unpublished reminiscences of Jim by his sister Maggie, and rare extracts from a forgotten work, The Taming of the Jungle, by Corbett’s half-brother Charles Doyle.

D.C. Kala’s writings from the mid-1950s describing what is now the Corbett Park appear here too, as do extracts from Memoirs of the Raj by G.R. Kala, a government official and contemporary of Corbett posted in the Kumaon regions where the hunter was most active.

Finally, the full text of Jim Corbett’s lengthy Last Will and Testament is reproduced, affording new insights into his character and state of mind at the end of his life.

All readers of Corbett’s compelling corpus will require this book to complete their collection of his inimitable writings.