Rudyard Kipling JUST SO STORIES The Just So Stories for Little Children are a collection written by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Highly fantasised origin stories, especially for differences among animals, they are among Kipling's best known works. The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi (why in French) or origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's "How Fear Came," included in his The Second Jungle Book (1895). In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes.