Picked up by an American book club it quickly became a bestseller. 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.’ Inspired he wrote The Sword in the Stone (1938) as a sort of prequel to Malory, detailing Arthur’s childhood. ‘I got desperate among my books,’ he wrote to a friend in 1937, ‘and picked it up in lack of anything else. Still, he was surprised when, a decade later, he re-read Malory’s fifteenth-century prose-epic. White wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and he knew the Arthurian legends pretty well. White's writing in The Once and Future King. Editor's Note: Adam Roberts, author and Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, has written a number of critical works on both SF and 19th Century poetry and is a contributor to the SF Encyclopedia.
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