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King Under the Mountain

D.J. Taylor
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781408721803
  • Dimensions: 156 x 240mm
  • Publication Date: 17 Sep 2026
  • Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Description

Since his death in 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien's major works - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion - have sold over half a billion copies, been made into prodigiously successful films and had an incalculable influence on the generations of fantasy writers who followed in their wake. But Tolkien himself remains an enigma - a deeply conservative Oxford don and a diehard Roman Catholic who regarded biography as a waste of time, was suspicious of literary criticism and jealously guarded his private life from an intrusive media.

Few major literary figures of the twentieth century are shrouded in such mystery. The King Under the Mountain unravels Tolkien's life and work: part biography, part critical study and part a fan's notes on the deepest recesses of Tolkien's imaginative world, D. J. Taylor unpicks the myths that Tolkien created around himself, as well as the social, political and cultural contexts that informed his work with dazzling effect.
About D.J. Taylor
D.J. Taylor's Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. His other works of non-fiction include Thackeray (1999), Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 (2007), The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016) and Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 (2019). He has written a dozen novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent books are the short story collection Stewkey Blues (2022) and Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews 2010-2022 (2023). His journalism appears in a variety of publication on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the New Criterion, the Critic and Private Eye. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

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