The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) is John Steinbeck's retelling of the Arthurian
legend, based on the Winchester Manuscript text of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. He
began his adaptation in November 1956. Steinbeck had long been a lover of the Arthurian
legends. The introduction to his translation contains an anecdote about him reading them as a
young boy. His enthusiasm for Arthur and his affinity for Anglo-Saxon language are apparent in
the work. The book was left unfinished at his death, and ends with the death of chivalry in
Arthur's purest knight, Lancelot of the Lake.
Steinbeck took a "living approach" to the retelling of Malory's work. He followed Malory's
structure and retained the original chapter titles, but he explored the psychological aspects of the
events, and adapted the language to sound natural and accessible to a Modern English speaker:
"Malory wrote the stories for and to his time. Any man hearing him knew every word and every
reference. There was nothing obscure; he wrote the clear and common speech of his time and
country. But that has changed — the words and references are no longer common property, for a
new language has come into being. Malory did not write the stories. He simply wrote them for his
time and his time understood them... And with that, almost by enchantment the words began to
flow." — Steinbeck, in a letter.
Reading Guides http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/acts_of_king_arthur.html
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Introduction
The first book that John Steinbeck ever loved was Sir
Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century narrative of Arthurian
legends, Le Morte D’Arthur, and even later in his life, that
book continued to be a major influence on both Steinbeck’s
worldview and his creative output. In the latter half of the
1950s, having already won lasting fame as the author of Of
Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden,
Steinbeck was seized by a powerful urge to return to his
first great inspiration. Setting aside the American themes
and places that he explored in his immortal fiction, he took
up the mammoth task of retelling Malory’s stories from a
more modern point of view. Steinbeck eventually became
so absorbed in this new, exciting work that he thought it
might become his crowning achievement. Early in 1959, he
told an interviewer that he had “learned to write and
[would] not write anything more—just a history of King
Arthur.”
What began for Steinbeck as an apparently straightforward work of translation and revision
acquired a life of its own, as he strove not only to give new life to Malory but also to use the tales
of King Arthur as a medium for his own expression. He traveled to England and Italy and read, by
his own count, “literally hundreds of books on the Middle Ages.” In a strange but undeniable
fashion, the book that was to become The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights transformed
its author himself into a modern version of a questing knight endlessly pursuing the Holy Grail of
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his story. In the end, Steinbeck was able to complete drafts of only seven chapters of the book
that he had hoped would be “the best work of my life and the most satisfying.” Steinbeck’s grail
finally eluded him.
Nevertheless, his unfinished manuscript, published in 1976, eight years after his death, has been
recognized as a work of strange, if imperfect power—both as a vigorous and keenly seen
reworking of Malory’s tales and as a significant fable for modern times. The Acts of King Arthur
and His Noble Knights speaks eloquently of honor and gallantry, deception and betrayal. While
resurrecting the medieval mind of Malory and the legends of ancient Britain, it also comments
between the lines on the anxieties and anomie of modern living. As Steinbeck wrote to Jacqueline
Kennedy, “The fifteenth century [Malory’s era] and our own have so much in common—loss of
authority, loss of gods, loss of heroes, and loss of lovely pride. . . . At our best we live by the
legend.” In The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, Steinbeck restores the glorious spirit of
this bygone age.
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights tells both familiar stories like “The Sword in the
Stone” and less well-known like the fatalistic “Knight with Two Swords.” It gives us the shining
figures of Arthur and Lancelot and the darker specter of Morgan le Fay. It revives the magic of
Merlin and the charm of Guinevere. Perhaps most important, it gives us the reflections of a
Nobel– and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer on the mysteries of good and evil. Elucidated by a
foreword by Christopher Paolini, the acclaimed author of Eragon, and supplemented by a fine
appendix of selections from Steinbeck’s letters, which chronicle both the coming together and the
eventual unraveling of his project, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is an irresistible
volume both for those who wish to know King Arthur and those who wish to recover a lost piece
of themselves.
ABOUT JOHN STEINBECK
One of the greatest American writers, and one who had an innate
understanding of the strength of the human spirit, John Steinbeck, born in
Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about
twenty-five miles from the Pacific coast. Both the valley and the coast would
serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford
University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses
until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he
supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time
working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of
Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The
Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935),
stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck
changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California
laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by
many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book
Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious
student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing
Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row
(1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The
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Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952),
an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with
whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin
IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the
posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The
Grapes of Wrath (1989).
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 and in 1964 he was presented with the
United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in
1968. Today, he remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures.
Works by John Steinbeck
Novels and
novellas
Short story
collections
Screenplays
Non-fiction
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Cup of Gold (1927)
The Red Pony (1933)
To a God Unknown (1933)
Tortilla Flat (1935)
In Dubious Battle (1936)
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
The Moon Is Down (1942)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Wayward Bus (1947)
The Pearl (1947)
Burning Bright (1950)
East of Eden (1952)
Sweet Thursday (1954)
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957)
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
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The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
The Long Valley (1938)
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The Forgotten Village (1941)
La perla (1947)
The Red Pony (1949)
Viva Zapata! (1952)
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Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942)
A Russian Journal (1948)
The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
Once There Was a War (1958)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)
America and Americans (1966)
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)
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