The Inklings were the most important literary set of the twentieth century. The group that centered around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien influenced not just the direction of literature?especially through fantasy, science fiction, and biography?but the very direction of our civilization as World War II reshaped what it meant to be a man of the West.

Though much has been written about them, almost all scholarship on the Inklings has revolved around Lewis. While he was indeed critical to the formation and maintenance of the group, it was Tolkien's larger mythology, out of which The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion arose, that animated the group and continues to sustain its legacy.

Tolkien and the Inklings revives a legendary friendship that spanned the 1930s and 1940s, chronicling the storied group from the point of view of Tolkien and the other Inklings. Having fought in the trenches of World War I, Tolkien?like all of the Inklings?was acutely aware of the fragility of civilization. After witnessing the rise of fascism, national socialism, and communism, and sending their sons off to fight World War II, the Inklings resolved to mount a bardic defense of Western civilization from Socrates through Dante and beyond. Perhaps, just perhaps, myth and legend might reawaken the West to what it could be and to what it once aspired. Tolkien and the Inklings shows that the enduring power of these men comes from the strength of a friendship for the ages.

BRADLEY J. BIRZER is the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History at Hillsdale College. Co-founder of and Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative, Birzer is the author of nine books, including the award-winning, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, favorably reviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. His other books include J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth; Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson; American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton; Neil Peart: Cultural Repercussions; In Defense of Andrew Jackson; Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West; and Mythic Realms: The Moral Imagination in Literature and Film. Currently, he is working on an intellectual biography of sociologist Robert Nisbet, a book examining Ray Bradbury's imagination, as well as a 250th anniversary history of the Declaration of Independence. He and his wife, Dedra (also an academic and editor), have seven children, four cats, and one dog. They divide their time between Michigan and South Dakota.