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Terence Hanbury White

by Marjory Austin
from Westminster, CO


My hero is a famous and well-known English writer named Terence Hanbury White who lived from 1906 to 1964. T. H. White was born on May 29th, 1906 in Bombay, India, where his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service, and was educated at Cheltenham and Queen's College, Cambridge. He was an English master at Stowe School from 1930 to 1936, and while there, completed his first real critical success, England Have My Bones, which was an autobiographical account of his country life.

Mr. White had written several, well-loved, novels but the most known and most beloved of all of his novels was The Sword and the Stone, which was turned into a Disney movie later on. One of my personal favorites was his The Once and Future King, which is a delightful and very real feeling novel, which retells nearly the entire life of King Arthur and Camelot.

However, those were not Mr. White's only novels, he has written ones such as:

Loved Helen and Other Poems (1929)
The Green Bay Tree (1929)
Dead Mr Nixon (1931)
Darkness At Pemberley (1932)
They Winter Abroad (1932)
First Lesson (1932)
Farewell Victoria (1933)
Earth Stopped (1934)
Gone to Ground (1935)
England Have My Bones (1936)
Burke's Steerage (1938)
The Witch in the Wood (1939)
The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
The Candle in the Wind
Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)
The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)
The Age of Scandal (1950)
The Goshawk (1951)
The Scandalmonger (1952)
The Book of Beasts (1954)
The Master (1957)
The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)
America At Last (1965)
The Book of Merlyn (1977)

The last novel, published in 1977 was not actually “written” by Mr. White, it was more or less a continuation of his earlier novel The Once and Future King.

In my best opinion, Mr. Terence Hanbury White was my hero because his novels had a sense of real feeling. The events that took place were very real to actual events in any current time; but I believe it was the way Mr. White had put in long winded yet important and insightful pages that told of life and all of it's glory on a “medium grey scale”. Not a way that told of the bad things in life, and not really in a way that told of the best things in life, but as a third person point of view on the whole thing that dug deeply into all of it's readers. Just reading some of his “stuck in” paragraphs gave you a moral meaning that would indeed stay with you forever.

One very wonderful thing Mr. White did in one of his novels, The Once and Future King, was that he had brought out, examined, and gave strong opinions about such things as fascism, war, and the ideals of religion.


In my own opinion, I believe Mr. White had placed himself as one of the characters in The Once and Future King, as Merlyn the wise wizard that taught Wart (Arthur). Both Mr. White and Merlyn had the same ideals of the same subjects, and spoke of them in the same way. I truly admired the way Mr. White could teach you so many important and valuable facts about life that was spoken so easily, just within a few paragraphs of a book. I would have loved to at least once in my life time talk with Mr. White, but unfortunately, he had passed on long before my birth.

Page created on 2/26/2004 12:00:00 AM

Last edited 2/26/2004 12:00:00 AM

The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.

Related Links

England Have My Bones - A biography page dedicated to T.H. White.