Profile of T.H. White on Famous Like Me

Terence Hanbury White (May 29, 1906 – January 17, 1964) was a writer. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.

After graduating from Queens' College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in English, he spent some time teaching at Stowe, before becoming a full-time writer. He was interested in hunting, flying, hawking and fishing. He was an intensely-involved naturalist.

White is most famous for writing The Once and Future King, a sequence of novels that retell Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, reinterpreting the legend of King Arthur. The sequence includes:

• The Sword in the Stone (1938)
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, originally titled The Witch in the Wood (1939)
• The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
• The Candle in the Wind (1958)
• The Book of Merlyn (published separately and posthumously, 1977)

The Broadway musical Camelot was based on The Once and Future King.

White wrote many other books, some under a pseudonym. They include a children's book, Mistress Masham's Repose, in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. Also for children was The Master, set on Rockall. Other works include The Goshawk, an account of White's ill-fated attempt to train a hawk in the traditional art of falconry; The Godstone and the Blackymor, a travel book set in Ireland; England Have My Bones, an account of a year spent in England; and The Age of Scandal and The Scandalmonger, collections of essays on 18th-century England.

He died aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece) while returning home from his American lecture tour.

More information can be found in Sylvia Townsend Warner's excellent biography, TH White.

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