The Hobbit.

"In enchanted Middle-earth, a small, comfort-loving Hobbit is awakened from his slumbers by a visitor who tells of lost treasure. Before Bilbo Baggins returns home again, he journeys past wizards and elves, talkative trees and treasure-guarding dragons, all swirling in cosmic battle between good and evil. J.R.R. Tolkien's fully realized fantasy world won over generations of children, and dazzled adults with its deft interweaving of medieval legend and made-up languages, maps, and creatures. Tolkien legitimized the modern fantasy genre, and provided the 1960's counterculture with antiwar, back-to-Eden icons" (NYPL Books of the Century 199). “Professor Tolkien’s epic of Middle Earth… [is] one of [the twentieth] century’s lasting contributions to that borderland of literature between youth and age. There are few such books—Gulliver’s Travels, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows—what else?… [They are] destined to become this century’s contribution to that select list of books which continue through the ages to be read by children and adults with almost equal pleasure” (Eyre, 67, 134-5). All historians of children’s literature… agree in placing [The Hobbit] among the very highest achievements of children’s authors during the 20th century” (Carpenter & Prichard, 254, 530). Published on September 21, 1937 in a first printing of only 1500 copies, The Hobbit had completely sold out by December 15. “It may have been a surprise to its publishers that a work as sui generis as The Hobbit should have been a popular success, but once it was a success there can have been no surprise in the clamor for a sequel. Tolkien had opened up a new imaginative continent, and the cry now was to see more of it” (Shippey, 49).