Umm, lessee, he was this funky guy who was a bit messed up in the head and wrote lots of cool stuff, the most famous of which was The Once And Future King because it appeared in the X-Men 2 movie when Ian McKellen was reading it. Ian McKellen is also very cool, but not as cool as T.H. White. TOAFK is five books about King Arthur, the last of which, The Book Of Merlyn, was banned because it was anti-war and British people weren't supposed to be anti-war in the 1940s because it was letting the side down and not keeping a stiff upper lip, so it generally doesn't appear in most bound volumes and that sucks for most people, but not for me because I have it on my shelf. The first book, The Sword In The Stone, was made into a Disney film that I used to love until I found out that Disney just lifted entire scenes and pieces of dialogue from the book and added weird songs. The books are full of intellectual stuff like allegories and metaphors and they're also funny and have swords in them, so they appeal to lowbrow readers like me. He wrote other books too but I can't be arsed dissecting them and some of them I haven't read yet, but one of them was about training falcons and another was about the Lilliputians from Swift's Gulliver's Travels. White was a very clever man who possessed a wonderful insight and keen sense of humour, and I agree on pretty much all of his philosophical, social, political, and psychological opinions (except the one about truth being an absolute, that was stupid) and I wish he hadn't been born a century ago in another country because I won't ever get to meet him and it makes me sad.
Oh, and The Once And Future King also got this terrible musical made about it called Camelot, and Monty Python totally took the piss out of Camelot in Holy Grail with their 'Knights of the Round Table' song. So T.H. White is related to Monty Python because they would both have thought Camelot was gay, and that rules.
If anyone manages to find something truly negative to say about the guy, I'll be very impressed. Unless it's Bateman, who is not allowed in this thread, lest the awesomeness cause him to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.
This post has been edited by Rhubarb: 29 June 2005 - 04:51 AM