Th White

Vocation

Notable

British-Indian author who is best known for his multi-volume chronicles of King Arthur and his court, from "The Sword In The Stone," 1938 to "The Once And The Future King," 1958, upon which the Broadway musical Camelot was based. He taught at Cambridge University until 1936. Died on 1/17/1964, Piraeus, Greece. Born to English parents in Bombay, India his father is a police superintendent. He may have first learned the joy and attraction of fantasy, for which he will later become reknown, by growing up in what must have been a dysfunctional home with an alcoholic father and an emotionally frigid mother. His parents separate when Terrence is fourteen. From then on he was on his own in school but he was good at that. Ultimately he goes to Queens' College at Cambridge and meets the literary influence and mentor of his life: L. J. Potts. At Queens' he begins a quest that will be a life-time study and writes a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. With a world class degree in English from Cambridge he graduates in 1928. He is twenty-two years old. He begins teaching for eight years at Stowe School, an English boy's school in Buckinghamshire but he leaves Stowe School in 1936 at age 30 and lives in a workman's cottage, where he writes and in his own words "revert[ed] to a feral state." During this time he hunted, fished and engaged in falconry. In the autumn of 1937 he picked up Malory again and begins to write his first novel: "The Sword in the Stone" about King Arthur's childhood before he draws the sword from the stone and becomes King, when he was a boy, raised by Merlin and called Wart. The book is a success and a book-of-the-month club selection in 1939. With that success he moves to Ireland and stays clear of WW II and writes the material that will become "The Once and Future King" the continuing tales of Arthur, Merlin, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelot. J. K. Rowling credits T H White as a strong influenced on the Harry Potter books. ___________________________________________ “The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something.That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” ― T.H. White, The Once and Future King Link to Wikipedia biography