T.H. White

British · 1906 to 1964

Born Terence Hanbury White on May 29, 1906, in Bombay, then British India, where his father served as a superintendent in the Indian police, he was raised in an atmosphere of paternal alcoholism and maternal coldness that his parents finally ended by separation when he was fourteen. Schooling at Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire and Queens' College, Cambridge, refined the affection for Malory that would dominate his life; his undergraduate thesis took up Le Morte d'Arthur, and he graduated with a first in English in 1928, tutored by L. J. Potts, who became his lifelong friend and literary correspondent. He taught for four years at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, then in 1936 walked away from the classroom, moved into a workman's cottage nearby, and, by his own account, reverted to a feral state of falconry, hunting, fishing, and amateur aviation, partly undertaken to conquer his fear of heights. The Sword in the Stone (1938), written from a stray reach for Malory in autumn 1937, became a Book of the Month selection and the opening movement of what he would expand over twenty years into The Once and Future King (1958). The war found him in Doolistown, County Meath, as a de facto conscientious objector, drafting most of the Arthurian sequence in Irish quiet. He settled in Alderney in 1946 and lived there in genial seclusion, training hawks and writing The Goshawk (1951), Mistress Masham's Repose (1946), and The Age of Scandal (1950). Lerner and Loewe's Camelot ran on Broadway from 1960. White died of heart failure on January 17, 1964, in a cabin aboard ship at Piraeus, Greece, returning to Alderney after a lecture tour in the United States, and was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens.