The Once and Future King

About the Author

TERENCE HANBURY WHITE was born in 1906 in India, where his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service, and educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge.

The author of poems, books about hunting and other sports and some detective stories, he found fame and success with The Sword in the Stone (1939), the brilliantly imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He continued the story in The Witch in the Wood (1940) and The Ill-Made Knight (1941). In 1940, he wrote what was believed to be the final volume of his Arthurian saga, The Candle in the Wind. The four books were revised and published in 1958 as a single volume titled The Once and Future King.

However, a further manuscript, concluding the story, was discovered among T. H. White’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin after the author’s death in 1964. This is The Book of Merlyn, written in 1941. Other papers at the University of Texas show that T. H. White intended all five books to make up the complete The Once and Future King. Here for the first time all five books appear as a whole. An afterword by White’s biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner reveals the story behind this greatest of English fantasy novels.