author
C. W. (Charles William) Doyle
1852–1903
A physician as well as a novelist, he drew on years spent in India to write adventurous fiction set far from Victorian drawing rooms. His best-known books blend travel, medicine, and colonial-era observation into brisk, unusual stories.
1 Audiobook
The Taming of the Jungle
by C. W. (Charles William) Doyle
About the author
Born in India in 1852, Charles William Doyle was a British-American physician and writer whose life moved between medicine and literature. Sources about his career consistently connect him with India, where he spent the early part of his life, and with later years in California, where he died in Santa Cruz in 1903.
Doyle studied medicine and went on to practice as a doctor, but he also published fiction under the name C. W. Doyle. He is best remembered for novels including The Taming of the Jungle and The Shadow of Quong Lung, works that drew on Indian and Asian settings and gave his storytelling a distinctive sense of place.
Though not a household name today, Doyle stands out as a writer who brought firsthand experience into popular fiction. His background as a doctor, along with his travels and years in India, gave his books an unusual mix of adventure, observation, and lived detail.