A pioneering political journalist, T. H. White (1915-1986) gained prominence for his indepth coverage of American political campaigns. His book The Making of the President--1960 helped to alter the style and character of presidential campaigns as well as...

T. H. White is best known for his transformations of stories of the past. His four-volume masterpiece, The Once and Future King (1958), gives new life to the works of Sir Thomas Malory, and White also retells, or provides sequels for, stories told by suc...

Like British scholars C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Terence Hanbury White turned his concern for the events leading to World War II into the unexpected--a highly original children's book, The Sword in the Stone (1938). Unlike them White wrote his fir...

The recent death of the British novelist Terence Hanbury White probably passed unnoticed among the majority of readers, yet White is the major interpreter of the Arthurian legend in the twentieth century, and his book The Once and Future King possibly will endure as one of the great works of romantic fiction in English literature. It is unjust that the novel has been given so little critical acclaim, and it seems appropriate at this time to evaluate its uniqueness and significance in the evolution of the Ar...

Since 1939 a great many readers, this reviewer and his family included, have been earnest, indeed passionate, devotees of T. H. White's "The Sword in the Stone." That unique and utterly captivating book deals with the youth of King Arthur and the remarkable pedagogy of the magician Merlin…. Now [with The Once and Future King] Mr. White, after over two decades of work, has extended his tale into the entire Arthurian epic….

The Book of Merlyn was written with the improvidence of an impulse. It holds much that is acute, disturbing, arresting, much that is brilliant, much that is moving, besides a quantity of information. But Merlyn, the main speaker, is made a mouthpiece for spleen, and the spleen is White's. His fear of the human race, which he seemed to have got the better of, had recurred, and was intensified into fury, fury against the human race, who make war and glorify it. No jet of spleen falls on the figure of A...