Malory (1405-1471) is important because he wrote the first major Arthurian romance, which continues to be rewritten up to the current day. I don’t see the summary here being very important; I would remember, however, that this is a work of prose. Many questions on the GRE can be answered if simply you remember whether a work is prose or verse. A good GRE question would try to trick you into identifying Malory as the author a verse Arthurian romance.
Here’s a brief history of the man and the work:
Few facts are certain in Malory’s history. From his own words he is known to have been a knight and prisoner, and his description of himself as “a servant of Jesu both day and night” has led to the inference that he might have been a priest . It is believed that he was knighted in 1442 and entered the British Parliament representing Warwickshire in 1445 .
In 1450, it appears that he turned towards a life of crime, being accused of murder, robbery, stealing, poaching, and rape. However, the validity of these charges are the subject of much controversy given Malory’s unclear political affiliations. False charges were common amidst the political strife of the War of the Roses. Supposedly while imprisoned for most of the 1450s (mostly in London ‘s Newgate Prison ), he began writing an Arthurian legend that he called The Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table. His work was first published posthumously by William Caxton as Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485.
Malory is believed to have obtained the material for his work from many French sources in addition to earlier English Arthurian Romances, most notably the stanzaic Morte Arthur and the alliterative Morte Arthure. In the preface to the first edition of the Le Morte D’Arthur , William Caxton speaks of the work as printed by himself “after a copy unto me delivered, which copy Sir Thomas Malory did take out of certain books of French, and reduced it into English.” Malory himself tells us that he finished the book in the ninth year of King Edward IV of England (about 1470 ). Le Morte D’Arthur brought together the various strands of the legend in a prose romance which many critics reckon the best of its kind.
Vade Mecum 