T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958) (From the White's comments on the bookjacket: "In have had the Matter of Britain on my hands for twenty years. That is what it has been called since before the days of Malory, and it is a serious subject. I have tried to deal with every side of it--with the clash between Might and Right, man's place in nature, the problem of war, the racial background which is an important part of the story, and with King Arthur's personal doom: The Aristotelian tragedy which made Malory call his long book the Morte d'Arthur. I have tried to look at it through the innocent eyes of young people, because I don't very much believe in the modern theory that the whole object of life is gratified desire. Malory didn't either. I have tried to make the seriousness acceptable by getting as much fun as possible out of the comic characters. I have invented a love-affair for king Pellinore--the only addition to Malory, except that he did not say that Lancelot was ugly. Almost all the people in this book are in his wonderful one, and have the same characters in both. I hope the moral is not to heavy, but the story was always a deep one. After all, it the major British epic--more so than Milton's Italian excursion. English writers, including great ones like Tennyson, have been mulling it over for a thousand years, and for that matter Milton himself thought of doing it before he decided to deal with Adam.".).
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (New York: The Modern Library, 1994).
