The Once and Future King

For the final one of these back-to-school themed posts (here is where I talked about favorite books to teach, here is where I talked about a favorite book set on campus), I wanted to talk about a book that I first read as a school assignment. It’s a little funny to me that the books that immediately sprang to mind were all from high school. Don’t get me wrong – I loved my high school English courses, and had two great teachers for the four years of classes. (Mr. Ploof for freshman year and AP US Lit, Mr. Wilkinson for sophomore year and AP Brit Lit and a semester of Shakespeare.) But I took a lot of lit courses after that – I got an entire doctorate! And yet still, back to high school it is.

T.H. White’s The Once and Future King wasn’t my first exposure to the Arthurian mythos, except for the part where it was. I don’t remember whether I first saw the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone or heard the Lerner and Loewe Camelot. I know they were close in time, and I was young. But both, of course, use White’s book as their source material. I do know that by the time The Once and Future King was on the syllabus, it was a story I already loved deeply.