T. H. White

White was born in Bombay, India to English parents and experienced a tumultuous childhood with an alcoholic father and emotionally distant mother—his parents separated when White was fourteen. White attended a boarding school in England and then Cambridge University where he wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. While at Cambridge, he was tutored by the scholar and author L.J. Potts who White referred to as "the greatest literary influence on my life." After Cambridge, he taught at Stowe school, before moving into a workman's cottage where he engaged in falconry, hunting, and fishing and wrote a series of novels about disasters and fantasy worlds. In Autumn, 1937 he found his way back to Malory and published The Sword in the Stone in 1938. During the Second World War, White moved to Ireland and lived as a conscientious objector. It was during this period that he wrote the final three parts to The Once and Future King. According to Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of White he was "a homosexual and a sado-masochist" and he never married. In 1946, White settled in Aldeney, one of the Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life—towards the end of his life he became a heavy drinker. He died in 1964 from a heart attack aboard a ship in Piraeus (Greece) en route to Aldeney from a lecture tour in the United States.