T.H. White

Terence Hanbury "Tim" White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English writer. He is best known for his Arthurian novels, which were published together in 1958 as The Once and Future King. One of his most memorable is the first of the series, The Sword in the Stone, which was published as a stand-alone book in 1938. White was born in Bombay, British India, to Garrick Hanbury White, a superintendent in the Indian police, and Constance Edith Southcote Aston. White had a troubled childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally cold mother, and his parents separated when he was 14.

White went to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, a public school, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional author L. J. Potts, who became a lifelong friend and correspondent. White later referred to him as "the great literary influence in my life." While at Queens College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.

White then taught at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire for four years. In 1936 he published England Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England. The same year, he left Stowe School and lived in a workman's cottage nearby, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state," engaging in falconry, hunting, and fishing. White also became interested in aviation, partly to conquer his fear of heights.

White's novel Earth Stopped (1934) and its sequel Gone to Ground (1935) are science fiction novels about a disaster that devastates the world. Gone to Ground contains several fantasy stories told by the survivors that were later reprinted in The Maharajah and Other Stories. White wrote to a friend that, in autumn 1937, "I got desperate among my books and picked [Malory] up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle, and an end implicit in the beginning, and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast. ... Anyway, I somehow started writing a book."

The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory," was titled The Sword in the Stone and published in 1938, telling the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. White was also influenced by Freudian psychology and his own lifelong involvement in natural history. The Sword in the Stone was critically well-received and was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939.

In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector.[9] In Ireland, he wrote most of what became The Once and Future King: The Witch in the Wood (later cut and rewritten as The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939 and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940. The version of The Sword in the Stone included in The Once and Future King differs from the earlier version; it is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version.

In 1946, White settled in Alderney, the third-largest Channel Island, where he lived for the rest of his life.[5] The same year, he published Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. Mistress Masham's Repose was influenced by John Masefield's book The Midnight Folk.[8] In 1947, he published The Elephant and the Kangaroo, a novel in which a repetition of Noah's Flood occurs in Ireland.

In the early 1950s, he published two non-fiction books. The Age of Scandal (1950) is a collection of essays about 18th-century England. The Goshawk (1951) is an account of White's attempt to train a northern goshawk using traditional rather than modern falconry techniques. He wrote it at his cottage in the mid-1930s, but he did not publish it until his agent David Garnett discovered it and insisted that it be published. In 1954, White translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary written in Latin.

In 1958, White completed the fourth book of The Once and Future King, The Candle in the Wind, which was first published with the other three parts and has never been published separately. White lived to see his Arthurian work adapted as the Broadway musical Camelot (1960) and the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963). 

White died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard a ship in Piraeus, Athens, Greece, en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States. He is buried in the First Cemetery of Athens. The Book of Merlyn was published posthumously in 1977 as a conclusion to The Once and Future King. His papers are held by the University of Texas at Austin.