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...

[The Book of Merlyn] was intended by the author to conclude his narrative series on King Arthur, the four books eventually brought together in The Once and Future King. It was never published. Written after the outbreak of World War II, its pacifist intention, together with the more mundane concerns of paper shortage, destroyed its chances of being printed. Texas Press discovered the manuscript in the archives of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in 1975, and so, over 35 years later,...