The life of J.R.R. Tolkien was in some ways every bit as eventful as one of his stories, containing tragedy and joy, adventure and danger. The richness of his life is captured brilliantly J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, the only authorised biography and the only book written by someone who actually met him, Humphrey Carpenter. Humphrey also worked with Christopher Tolkien to edit Tolkien's many thousands of letters into the candid and utterly compelling, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Carpenter's The Inklings is a fascinating page-turner that reveals Tolkien's relationship with those writers closest to him, especially C.S. Lewis. For those interested in Tolkien's early life leading up to the First World War, John Garth's remarkable Tolkien and the Great War draws upon a wealth of previously unavailable material from the Tolkien archive.