Ben Shapiro’s Guide To The Once And Future King

The following is an excerpt from Ben Shapiro’s Third Thursday Book Club guide to The Once and Future King. 

T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is widely considered the most influential fantasy novel ever written. Drawn from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, The Once and Future King’s retelling of the Arthurian legend has been an inspiration for authors ranging from J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series) to Lev Grossman (The Magicians) to Neil Gaiman (American Gods). T.H. White wrote only one great book: The Once and Future King. But that book was written over the course of decades, and really encompasses several smaller novels, fitted together with master craftsmanship. It is a funny novel, a political novel, a novel of romance and adventure — but most of all, it is a novel about the relationships between human beings, and how they reconcile those relationships with eternal, meaningful values … or whether the struggle and failure to do so is both the great human tragedy, and the source of man’s inherent dignity.