Le Morte d'Arthur

Le Morte d'Arthur is a Middle English prose compilation of Arthurian legend by the English writer Sir Thomas Malory, completed around 1470 and first printed by William Caxton in 1485. Drawing together and reworking earlier French and English sources into a single continuous narrative, the book traces the whole span of King Arthur's legend, from his birth and his drawing of the sword from the stone, through the establishment of the Round Table at Camelot and the adventures of knights including Lancelot, Gawain and Tristan, to the quest for the Holy Grail, the doomed love affair between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and the final civil war brought on by that betrayal, which ends with Arthur's death and departure to the isle of Avalon. Malory compiled the work, according to his own closing note, while imprisoned, and Caxton's printed edition, which divided the text into twenty-one books, became the version through which most later English-language readers encountered the Arthurian legend. Widely regarded as the most influential English-language treatment of Arthurian material, Le Morte d'Arthur shaped the work of writers from Edmund Spenser and Alfred Tennyson to T. H. White and John Steinbeck, and it remains the primary source most later English retellings of Arthur, the Round Table and the Grail quest draw upon.