The Man Who Would Be King

The Man Who Would Be King · published 1888 · ISBN 9780141442358

Rudyard Kipling — Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) — United Kingdom (born in British India), writing in English. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

“in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Rudyard Kipling

British writer, poet, and journalist born in Bombay, celebrated for narrative energy, rhythmic language, and fictional worlds shaped by his years in India. His work profoundly influenced children’s literature, while its power and contradictions remain inseparable from the setting of the British Empire.

How it came to be

Kipling wrote the story in his early twenties and published it in 1888 in The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. Its historical name Kafiristan refers roughly to the region now called Nuristan in Afghanistan. The tale carries both the energy and the delusions of imperial adventure. This project uses the public-domain English original from Project Gutenberg #8147, and its future Vietnamese text will be a new translation independent of commercial editions.

Summary of The Man Who Would Be King

Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two British adventurers living by schemes in colonial India, resolve to cross the Hindu Kush and make themselves kings of Kafiristan. Rifles, military drill and a coincidence involving Freemasonry allow them to be received as rulers almost divine. When Dravot tries to turn performed authority into a real dynasty, however, the secret supporting the throne begins to collapse.

Analysis & legacy

The story is at once an adventure and the self-destruction of an imperial myth. Dravot and Carnehan assume that guns, organisation and audacity entitle them to rule people they barely understand. For a while, Kipling’s speed and their improvisation make the belief look plausible. Yet their exploit reaches us through a journalist’s frame, and Carnehan eventually returns as the broken evidence of disaster. The distance between the heroic story the men wish to inhabit and the survivor’s ruined body exposes the cost of turning other people into material for ambition. A Masonic sign misread as proof of divinity shows authority resting on a performance everyone has reason to believe. When Dravot seeks a wife and a royal line, he steps beyond that performance and breaks the tacit bargain protecting him. The men’s friendship gives the ending genuine grief without absolving the conquest that produced it. The tale therefore lets the fantasy of kingship condemn itself by carrying its logic to the end.

Themes: Ambition and hubris · Empire · Friendship · Myths of power · Frame narration

🎧 This page has an AI voice introducing the book (~3 min) — tap “Listen” in the app.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Man Who Would Be King about?

Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two British adventurers living by schemes in colonial India, resolve to cross the Hindu Kush and make themselves kings of Kafiristan. Rifles, military drill and a coincidence involving Freemasonry allow them to be received as rulers almost divine. When Dravot…

Is The Man Who Would Be King worth reading?

The story is at once an adventure and the self-destruction of an imperial myth. Dravot and Carnehan assume that guns, organisation and audacity entitle them to rule people they barely understand. For a while, Kipling’s speed and their improvisation make the belief look plausible. Yet their exploit…

When did Rudyard Kipling win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907: “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author”

Discover more Nobel Literature

• One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
• The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
• The Stranger — Albert Camus
• Beloved — Toni Morrison
• The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
• My Name Is Red — Orhan Pamuk
• Blindness — José Saramago
• The Years — Annie Ernaux
• Snow Country — Kawabata Yasunari
• In the Café of Lost Youth — Patrick Modiano
• The Vegetarian — Han Kang
• Conversation in the Cathedral — Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
• Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore
• The Home and the World — Rabindranath Tagore
• Palace Walk — Naguib Mahfouz
• Pygmalion — George Bernard Shaw
• Hunger — Knut Hamsun
• Growth of the Soil — Knut Hamsun
• The Late Mattia Pascal — Luigi Pirandello
• Death in Venice — Thomas Mann
• The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
• The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling
• Kim — Rudyard Kipling
• It Can’t Happen Here — Sinclair Lewis
• Main Street — Sinclair Lewis
• The Land of Heart's Desire — W. B. Yeats
• Justice — John Galsworthy
• The Man of Property — John Galsworthy
• The Hairy Ape — Eugene O'Neill
• The Melancholy of Resistance — László Krasznahorkai
• Septology — Jon Fosse
• Paradise — Abdulrazak Gurnah
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — Selma Lagerlöf
• The Blue Bird — Maurice Maeterlinck
• Independent People — Halldór Laxness
• Voss — Patrick White
• Burger's Daughter — Nadine Gordimer
• Omeros — Derek Walcott
• Flights — Olga Tokarczuk
• Quo Vadis — Henryk Sienkiewicz
• In Desert and Wilderness — Henryk Sienkiewicz
• The Immoralist — André Gide
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Death and the King's Horseman — Wole Soyinka
• The Unwomanly Face of War — Svetlana Alexievich
• Six Characters in Search of an Author — Luigi Pirandello
• Reeds in the Wind — Grazia Deledda
• The Gods Are Athirst — Anatole France