"Kim (1901) is Rudyard Kipling's story of an orphan born in colonial India and torn between love for his native India and the demands of Imperial loyalty to his Irish-English heritage and to the British Secret Service. Long recognized as Kipling's finest work, Kim was a key factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Our text is the 1901 first English edition, fully annotated for undergraduate readers and accompanied by maps of India and the Grand Trunk Road." ""Backgrounds" collects selections from Kipling's autobiography, letters, short stories, and poems; four contemporary assessments, including that of the Nobel Prize Committee; an excerpt from Charles Carrington's biography of Kipling; and contextual essays by Blair Kling and Ann Parry." "The thirteen interpretive essays in "Criticism" explore the novel's central themes and suggest the range of Kipling criticism from the 1950s to the present. Noel Annan, Irving Howe, Edward Said, Ian Baucom, A. Michael Matin, John A. McClure, Michael Hollington, Parama Roy, Sara Suleri, Patrick Williams, Suvir Kaul, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and Zohreh T. Sullivan provide their varied perspectives." "A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included."--Jacket.