J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.
Scholars have compared Tolkien to authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, writing that he fits into the romantic tradition of William Morris and W. B. Yeats; has some connection with the Celtic Revival and the Symbolist movement; can be likened to the romantic Little Englandism and anti-statism of George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton between the wars; and the disillusionment of Orwell, William Golding, and Kurt Vonnegut after the Second World War.
Tolkien's writing has some clearly modern features, especially the strong emphasis on intertextuality, like the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; but he differs from them in using the diverse materials not so as to present a fragmented collage, but to create a world of his own, providing a mythic prehistory, a mythology for England.