In the late 1950s, having already won lasting fame as a novelist, John Steinbeck was seized by a powerful urge to return to a longtime dream: contemporizing Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur. Public humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson offers a fascinating look at the book that became the critically dismissed The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and Steinbeck’s quest to give new life to Malory and use the tales of King Arthur as a medium for his own expression.