English author, poet, and professor who created The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He was ranked by The Times, a London newspaper, as one of the fifty greatest English authors since 1945, and he is widely considered to be the father of the modern fantasy genre. He began reading when he was just four years old, and, in 1915, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with honors. He subsequently served in the British Army during World War I and later accepted a professorship in Anglo-Saxon literature at Pembroke College, Oxford.
