T. H. White (Terence Hanbury White) Biography

British novelist, born in India, educated at Cheltenham College and Queens' College, Cambridge. He is chiefly remembered for his novels founded on the Arthurian legend, beginning with The Sword in the Stone (1938) which, together with The Witch in the Wood (1939) and The Ill-Made Knight (1940), was incorporated into The Once and Future King (1958), a tragi-comic fantasia on Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Further novels, such as Mistress Masham's Repose (1946), which posits the survival in England of Swift's Lilliputians, also expressed his attraction to the past. Most of his short stories have been collected in The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981). His non-fiction includes England Have My Bones (1936), The Age of Scandal (1950), and The Scandalmonger (1952); the latter two volumes are glowing portraits of eighteenth-century life. In The Goshawk (1951) he describes, with great poetic intensity, his efforts to train a hawk. The Book of Beasts (1954) is a free translation from a twelfth-century Latin bestiary. There is a life by S. T. Warner, published in 1967.