T. H. White

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This article is about the British novelist T. H. White. For the American journalist, see Theodore White.

Terence Hanbury White (May 29, 1906 – January 17, 1964) was an English writer, born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.

After graduating from Queens' College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in English, he spent some time teaching at Stowe, before becoming a full-time writer. He was interested in hunting, flying, hawking and fishing. He was an intensely-involved naturalist, which influenced many of the chapters in The Sword in the Stone. He learned to fly to conquer his fear of heights. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, White moved to Ireland where he lived out the duration as a conscientious objector. It was in Ireland that he wrote most of what would later become The Once and Future King, having read and loved Le Morte d'Arthur years earlier. His indirect experience of the war had a profound effect on the book, which includes commentaries on war and human nature in the form of a heroic narrative.

White is most famous for writing The Once and Future King, a sequence of novels that retell Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, reinterpreting the legend of King Arthur. The sequence includes:

The Sword in the Stone (1938)
The Queen of Air and Darkness, originally titled The Witch in the Wood (1939)
The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
The Candle in the Wind (1958)
The Book of Merlyn (published separately and posthumously, 1977)

The Broadway musical Camelot was based on The Once and Future King, as was the animated film The Sword in the Stone.

White wrote many other books, some under a pseudonym. They include a children's book, Mistress Masham's Repose, in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. Also for children was The Master, set on Rockall. Other works include:

The Elephant and the Kangaroo, a novel about a repetition of Noah's Flood occurring in Ireland;
The Goshawk, an account of White's attempt to train a hawk in the traditional art of falconry;
The Godstone and the Blackymor, a travel book set in Ireland;
England Have My Bones, an account of a year spent in England; and
The Age of Scandal and The Scandalmonger, collections of essays on 18th-century England.

White also translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary from Latin.

He died aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece) while returning home to Alderney from his American lecture tour.