The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

The first book John Steinbeck read as a child was the Caxton Morte d'Arthur, and he considered it one of the most challenging tasks of his career to modernize the stories of King Arthur. “These stories are alive even in those of us who have not read them,” he says. “And, in our day, we are perhaps impatient with the words and the stately rhythms of [Thomas] Malory. I wanted to set the stories down in meaning as they were written, leaving out nothing and adding nothing.” John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was the author of many books, including Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, East of Eden, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath (which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939). In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Robert Fass -- actor, director, writer, photographer, and musician -- starred opposite Theodore Bikel in the hit off-Broadway production of The Gathering. Other credits include leading roles in The Kids at Mile Square Theatre; The Night That Roger... at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater; Dent at Hartford Stage (opposite Isabel Keating); and Stars at Soho Rep. He can be heard weekly on the InTouch network reading The New Yorker magazine for the visually impaired