J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien was an English writer and academic philologist whose scholarly work in early English literature fed directly into the invented languages and histories behind his fiction. The Hobbit appeared in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings between 1954 and 1955, and together they did more than any other work to define modern fantasy as a genre. He died in 1973. Readers still come to him for worlds built with a linguist’s patience rather than a plotter’s shortcuts.