While living in a gamekeeper's cottage near Stowe School, where he served as head of the English department until his resignation in 1936, White reread Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the fifteenth-century chronicle of King Arthur, his Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail. Reading Malory purely for pleasure (rather than for an assignment) made White look at the Arthurian myth in a new light; he found the story exciting and relevant to modern life. White was unable to shake off its allure; in a letter dated January 14, 1938, he wrote to Potts, his tutor: "I was thrilled and astonished to find (a) that the thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning, and (b) that the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast . . . It is more or less a kind of wish-fulfillment of the kind of things I should have liked to have happened to me when I was a boy."
Later that year, White published his "wish-fulfillment" as The Sword in the Stone. It was selected as a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and received glowing reviews. Writing in The New Statesman, David Garnett called it "the most delightful book for old and young"; Vida D. Scudder, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, remarked, "If you are a boy, you can find here the best battles and enchantments going. If you are a serious-minded adult, you will savor the suggestions of an advanced educational theory."
