Picture the writer J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the international best-sellers The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Writers, especially those who have been dead for 50 years, are not particularly recognizable celebrities, but you might imagine a tweedy, waistcoated Oxford professor, surrounded by books, puffing a pipe. Not unlike a hobbit, in fact—kindly and comfortably well off.
And you would be right, except in one respect: for most of his life, Tolkien struggled, often desperately, with money. Until his very last years, he earned little from his books, and when he finally did see profits, it was too late for him to enjoy them.
