During his time there, he wrote the sequels to The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood and the Ill-Made Knight. In 1939 White moved to Ireland where he remained during the second world war as a conscientious objector. The book became a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939. It would bring a child’s delight to the story of Arthur’s early days and was influenced by Freudian psychology and White’s love of natural history. This book was The Sword in the Stone, which White considered a preface to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur that he had written his thesis upon.

Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast Anyway, I somehow started writing a book.” He wrote to a friend in 1937, “I got desperate among my books and picked up in lack of anything else. Once they were completed, White was searching for a new subject to write about. Earth Stopped in 1934 and its sequel Gone to Ground in 1935 concerned dystopian themes. White considered him to be “the great literary influence in my life.” It was at Queens’ College that White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and was exposed to the legends of King Arthur.Īfter his graduation in 1928 he began teaching and to write. Potts would become his friend and correspondent throughout his life. He later studied at Queens’ College in Cambridge where he was tutored by scholar and author L.J.

His parents separated when he was fourteen years of age and he returned to England to finish his schooling in Gloucestershire. White was born in Bombay, British India, to Garrick Hanbury White and Constance White.

Sword in the stone novel