The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

"The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" (1976) is John Steinbeck's retelling of the Arthurian legend, based on the Winchester Manuscript text of Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur". He began his adaptation in November 1956. Steinbeck had long been a lover of the Arthur tales. The introduction to his translation contains an anecdote about him reading them as a young boy. His enthusiasm for Arthur and his affinity for Anglo-Saxon language are apparent in the work. The book was left unfinished at his death, and ends ironically with the death of chivalry in Arthur's purest knight, Sir Lancelot of the Lake.

Steinbeck took a "living approach" to the retelling of Malory's work; he followed the original structure of Malory, and indeed even kept the original chapter titles, but the text of the book was written in a modern way, and while the general plots are the same, Steinbeck added a more heavily psychological structure and background, modernizing the original novel, and changing the language, not to make it easier for modern readers, but to find the tone and structure with which Malory approached readers of his time, and find the corresponding tone and structure of today:

"Malory wrote the stories for and to his time. Any man hearing him knew every word and every reference. There was nothing obscure, he wrote the clear and common speech of his time and country. But that has changed - the words and references are no longer common property, for a new language has come into being. Malory did not write the stories. He simply wrote them for his time and his time understood them... And with that, almost by enchantment the words began to flow." -"Steinbeck, in a letter."