31 - The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Summary

“Fiction.”

Publishers' Weekly, 210

(30 August 1976), 332–3.

When John Steinbeck was a boy, he discovered the Caxton Morte d'Arthur. The fascination of the stories, the language, the old words never diminished for him. Eventually he began to work on his own version of some of the 15th century tales. His research took him to the Winchester Mss. (more authentic than Caxton's edited printed edition) and to noted Malory scholar Eugene Vinaver, who helped him with his Arthurian research. The seven tales here were completed in 1959. Steinbeck's aim was “to set them down in plain present day speech… (to) keep the wonder and the magic.” He does just that for old and young alike. Delightful too is the bonus: correspondence with his literary agent. It reveals the extent of Steinbeck's interest in Malory, his own artistic concerns and his problems with the Arthur project. A wonderful, wise, posthumous gift to us from the prizewinning Steinbeck…

“Non-fiction.”

Kirkus Reviews, 44

(1 September 1976), 1025.

“Jehan Stynebec” maintained a lifelong devotion to the 15th-century minor hoodlum and “knyght presoner, sir Thomas Malleorre,” and long cherished the idea of retelling the Matter of Arthur for our time. Dating mostly from 1958-59, Steinbeck's fragmentary attempt represents both an earnest effort at scholarly perspective and a broad contemporary reinterpretation. He did not try to “translate,” but simplified and condensed Malory's language while tidying up some narrative loose ends. There are five brief, fairly straightforward versions of episodes from the first book (following Eugene Vinaver's edition of the Winchester MS) and two lengthy narratives based on the Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake and the Gawain, Ywain, and Marhalt episode.