creator
Tolkien, who lived from 1892 to 1973, had many predecessors: from the novels of William Morris, the first to be set in a completely fictional fantasy world, to the Conan stories from the pen of Robert E. Howard. However, none have been as popular as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
It was published in the 1950s in England and quickly gained its first readers, after which it penetrated the American market in the early 1960s, where fantasy stories of the genre called sword and magic, such as Conan’s, began to become popular again.
Book editor Donald A. Wollheim felt that Tolkien’s opus could fit in between them. Believing that the original publisher had forgotten to issue a trademark, and because the US had not yet joined the Universal Copyright Convention at the time, Wollheim published an unauthorized paperback of The Lord of the Rings. It reached a much wider audience than just fans of the “sword and sorcery” genre. It was so well received that Tolkien objected to the publication and demanded a royalty, which he eventually received. By the end of 1968, over three million copies had already been sold in the United States.
