John Steinbeck wrote [translated?] The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights from the Winchester Manuscript of Malory's tales. His work is more than a reduction, since John added to teh original stories [details?]. It was written in Somerset, England in 1958-9 and it is unfinished; it was not editied or corrected by John.

The excerpts from his letters . . . show that he wrote two drafts of parts of the book . . .. They describe some of his thoughts, show how he worked, and give some of his ideas about writing. John did not finish King Arthur, and did not say why or how he felt blocked, if indeed he was when he stopped work on it.

What is evident is his great and genuine interest in the subject [Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat is also loosely Arthurian]

-Charles Horton, Preface to the Appendix

Bio

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902. He graduated from Salinas High School in 1919. From there he attended Stanford University (intermittently) where his first publications, Fingers of Cloud and Adventures in Arcademy, were printed in The Stanford Speculator. In 1925 he left Stanford without a degree and traveled to New York where he worked as a construction laborer and reporter. He returned to California in 1926 and published humorous verse in The Stanford Speculator. He married Carol Henning in 1930 and began residence in Pacific Grove. In teh summer of '32, he moved to Los Angeles. In 1937 he went to New York to work on a stage version of Of Mice and Men; later in the year he visited both Europe and Oklahoma. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and went to the Gulf of California to collect marine invertebrates. He divorced Carol Henning in 1942. In 1943 he remarried and moved back to New York. He also spent several months in the European war zone as a correspondent for New York's Herald Tribune. His son Thomas wa born in 1944 and his second son, John, was born in 1946. In 1947 Steinbeck took a trip to Russia and in 1948 divorced his second wife. In 1950 he married again, for the third time, to Elaine Scott. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. He died in New York on December 20, 1968.

Works by John Steinbeck

Nonfiction

Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (in collaboration with Edward Ricketts)

Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team

A Russian Journal (with pictures by Robert Culp)

The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Once There Was A War

Travels With Charlie in Search of America

America and Americans

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters