The Hobbit

A children's fantasy novel by the English author and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, published in September 1937 by George Allen and Unwin in the United Kingdom and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. It follows the reluctant hobbit Bilbo Baggins, drawn from his quiet home in the Shire into a journey across Middle-earth with the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. Tolkien recalled beginning the book one day in the early 1930s, while marking School Certificate examination papers, when he found a blank page and spontaneously wrote its opening line about a hobbit living in a hole in the ground. Its warm reception, including praise from the poet W. H. Auden and a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for the best juvenile fiction of 1938, led Tolkien's publisher to ask for a sequel, which grew into The Lord of the Rings. It remains Tolkien's most widely read book and the work that first brought fantasy into the literary mainstream.