Works by
Sir Thomas Malory
(Writer)
[1405 (approximate) - March 14, 1471]

Books

• Le Morte D'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table (1485)
  The legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table have inspired some of the greatest works of literature--from Cervantes's Don Quixote to Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Although many versions exist, Malory's stands as the classic rendition. Malory wrote the book while in Newgate Prison during the last three years of his life; it was published some fourteen years later, in 1485, by William Caxton. The tales, steeped in the magic of Merlin, the powerful cords of the chivalric code, and the age-old dramas of love and death, resound across the centuries.
  
  The stories of King Arthur, Lancelot, Queen Guenever, and Tristram and Isolde seem astonishingly moving and modern. Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur endures and inspires because it embodies mankind's deepest yearnings for broth-erhood and community, a love worth dying for, and valor, honor, and chivalry.

Other

• King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales (1975), Eugene Vinaver, ed.
  This thoroughly readable collection of Malory's famous stories of King Arthur includes the familiar legends, plots, exploits, and characters which have become part of the cultural tradition of the English-speaking world.

See also:

• Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler (2006) by Christina Hardyment
  Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (1469) is one of the most renown books in the world. Virtually all modern versions of the Arthurian legends are derived from its energetic, memorably phrased and remarkably individual telling of the stirring exploits of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Yet the identity of the fifteenth-century knight who wrote it has remained an enigma for centuries. The existing records of his life imply that he was a criminal—accused of rape, ambush, rustling and attacks on abbeys—and in prison for most of his life.
  
  Using evidence from new historical research and deductions from the only known manuscript copy of Malory's masterpiece, Christina Hardyment resolves the contradictions in this brilliant story of a man who was marked by great achievement along with deep disgrace. She depicts Malory as an experienced soldier—who fought against the French with Henry V and was closely connected with the Knights Hospitallers' battles against the Turks in Rhodes—an expert on tournaments, a connoisseur of literature, a loyal subject who was deeply involved in the troubled politics of the Wars of the Roses, and a writer who intended his great work to inspire the princes and knights of his own time to high endeavors and noble acts.
  
  Christina Hardyment has not only given Sir Thomas Malory a biography worthy of King Arthur's greatest chronicler, she has also set it against a fascinating background: an age that would see the high-water mark of medieval chivalry and would also come to be seen as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the modern world.

• Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste Del Saint Graal and Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal (2001) by Anne Marie D'Arcy

• The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (1993, 1999) by P.J.C. Field
  Malory's stories of King Arthur and the Round Table have been widely read for centuries, but their author's own life has been as variously reported as that of any Arthurian knight. The first serious attempts to identify him were made in the 1890s, but the man who then seemed most likely to have written the book was later found to have been accused of attempted murder, rape, extortion, and sacrilegious robbery and to have spent ten years or more in prison. Could this be reconciled with the authorship of the most famous chivalric romance in English? Other candidates for authorship were proposed but there was little consensus. This book gives the most comprehensive consideration of the competing arguments yet undertaken. It is a fascinating piece of detective work followed by a full account of the life of the man identified as 'the' Malory. Close consideration of individual documents, many of which were entirely unknown in 1966, when the last book on Malory's life appeared, makes possible a fuller and more convincing story than has ever been told before.

• History of the Mallory Family (1984) by S. Mallory-Smith

• The King Arthur Companion: The Legendary World of Camelot and the Round Table (1983) by Phyllis Ann Karr

• Malory's Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte (1940, 1964) by Robert Lumiansky

• The Once and Future King (1958) by T. H. White