The tale of Arthur Pendragon, by turns both comic and tragic, told in a thoroughly anachronistic and post-modern way, reached me as few other books had. White’s The Once and Future King when I was seventeen, fresh from seeing the movie Camelot (1967) for the first time (the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Lowe was based on parts of White’s novel). I think they should be done because you ought to do them. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. The novels were famously adapted into the Disney film The Sword in the Stone in 1963.I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. He continued to explore the Arthurian mythos in four further volumes – The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn – a sequence collectively known as The Once and Future King. He found success with his ‘preface to Malory’, The Sword in the Stone, a wonderfully imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He has inspired generations of fantasy writers, from Neil Gaiman to JK Rowling.īorn in India in 1906, White studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Lewis and Mervyn Peake as one of the 20th Century’s greatest British fantasists.
White died in 1964, leaving a literary legacy that places him alongside J R.R. The Once and Future King, contains all five books about the early life of King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn).Įxquisite comedy offsets the tradegy of Arthur’s personal doom as White brings to life the major British epic of all time with brilliance, grandeur, warmth and charm White’s masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. The extraordinary story of a boy called Wart – ignored by everyone except his tutor, Merlin – who goes on to become King Arthur.
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