Thomas Malory
England
Plain, chronicle-like prose that narrates catastrophe and chivalry with the same even tone, letting the tragedy accumulate through simple, relentless sequence.
The identity of 'Thomas Malory, knight' has never been fully settled, but the strongest candidate is a Warwickshire landowner and MP repeatedly jailed across the 1450s on charges including armed robbery, extortion, cattle theft, and rape, charges that may owe partly to Wars of the Roses factional politics rather than pure criminality.
He compiled Le Morte d'Arthur, by his own colophon, while a 'knight-prisoner,' drawing on French Arthurian romances and older English sources to assemble the fullest single account of Arthur's rise, the Round Table's glory, and its collapse through betrayal and civil war: a story that echoed the fractured England he was living through.
William Caxton printed it in 1485, shortly after Malory's death, shaping it into the fifteenth century's first English bestseller and the template every Arthurian retelling since has drawn from.
Their books in the atlas
- 1485
Le Morte d'ArthurLvl 6romance
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