John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of the world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide.
In the 1960s he was taken up by many members of the nascent "counter-culture" largely because of his concern with environmental issues. In 1997 he came top of three British polls, organised respectively by Channel 4 / Waterstone's, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK's leading science fiction media magazine, amongst discerning readers asked to vote for the greatest book of the 20th century. Please note also that his name is spelt Tolkien (there is no "Tolkein").
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch
1. Childhood And Youth
The name "Tolkien" (pron.: Tol-keen; equal stress on both syllables) is believed to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever - hence the pseudonym "Oxymore" which he occasionally used. His father's side of the family appears to have migrated from Saxony in the 18th century, but over the century and a half before his birth had become thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald ("Ronald" to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England - or more particularly, the West Midlands.
The West Midlands in Tolkien's childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien's life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward's School. By then the family had moved to King's Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line - young Ronald's developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like" Nantyglo"," Penrhiwceiber" and "Senghenydd".
Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1900, together with her sister May, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half-Spanish half-Welsh Father Francis Morgan.
Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys' material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt-by-marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner.
By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward's; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the "T. C. B. S." (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other's literary work until 1916.
However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner's boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt. When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they struck up a friendship, which gradually deepened. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911, where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the "midway" stage of a 4-year Oxford "Greats" (i.e. Classics) course, although with an "alpha plus" in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf - he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:
“Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended”
- “Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men”. ("Middangeard" was a ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)
This inspired some of his very early and inchoate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying.
In the summer of 1913 he took a job as tutor and escort to two Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald's, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French.
Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1914.
2. War, Lost Tales And Academia
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [sic], which was heavily influenced by Finnish - but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [sic] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 22 March 1916.
Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to "trench fever", a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire.
During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the "T. C. B. S." had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “. . .. in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [ Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the "Gnomes", (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.
Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed at Hull that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his "Legendarium". He came to think of Edith as "Lúthien" and himself as "Beren". Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917.
When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the "Oxford English Dictionary"), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing - he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future "Inklings". However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1920 he applied for the quite senior post of Reader (approximately, Associate Professor) in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed.
At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and continued writing and refining The Book of Lost Tales and his invented "Elvish" languages. In addition, he and Gordon founded a "Viking Club" for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists, a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes. Leeds also saw the birth of two more sons: Michael Hilary Reuel in October 1920, and Christopher Reuel in 1924. Then in 1925 the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford fell vacant; Tolkien successfully applied for the post.
3. Professor Tolkien, The Inklings And Hobbits
In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. Although he had few illusions about the academic life as a haven of unworldly scholarship (see for example Letters 250), he was nevertheless by temperament a don's don, and fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.
However, his rare scholarly publications were often extremely influential, most notably his lecture "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics". His seemingly almost throwaway comments have sometimes helped to transform the understanding of a particular field - for example, in his essay on "English and Welsh", with its explanation of the origins of the term "Welsh" and its references to phonaesthetics (both these pieces are collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, currently in print). His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In 1945 he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in 1959. Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration.
His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon. In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in North Oxford, and later Ronald and Edith lived in the suburb of Headington.
However, Tolkien's social life was far from unremarkable. He soon became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends (by no means all at the University) with similar interests, known as "The Inklings". The origins of the name were purely facetious - it had to do with writing, and sounded mildly Anglo-Saxon; there was no evidence that members of the group claimed to have an "inkling" of the Divine Nature, as is sometimes suggested. Other prominent members included the above-mentioned Messrs Coghill and Dyson, as well as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and above all C. S. Lewis, who became one of Tolkien's closest friends, and for whose return to Christianity Tolkien was at least partly responsible. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress.
4. The Storyteller
Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins).
She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children's recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication.
By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit. He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion, or Silmarillion for short. He presented some of his "completed" tales to Unwin, who sent them to his reader. The reader's reaction was mixed: dislike of the poetry and praise for the prose (the material was the story of Beren and Lúthien) but the overall decision at the time was that these were not commercially publishable. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien was disappointed at the apparent failure of The Silmarillion, but agreed to take up the challenge of "The New Hobbit".
This soon developed into something much more than a children's story; for the highly complex 16-year history of what became The Lord of the Rings consult the works listed below. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival (which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent). It is thanks to Rayner Unwin's advocacy that we owe the fact that this book was published at all - Andave laituvalmes! His father's firm decided to incur the probable loss of £1,000 for the succès d'estime, and publish it under the title of The Lord of the Rings in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work's public appeal.
5. The "Cult"
The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis) to the damning (E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee) and just about everything in between. The BBC put on a drastically condensed radio adaptation in 12 episodes on the Third Programme. In 1956 radio was still a dominant medium in Britain, and the Third Programme was the "intellectual" channel. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.
The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the "Alternative Society".
This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had similar experiences with 2001- A Space Odyssey. Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p.m. (their time - 3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest, what was the preterite of Quenyan lanta-, or whether or not Balrogs had wings. So he changed addresses, his telephone number went ex-directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a pleasant but uninspiring South Coast resort (Hardy's "Sandbourne"), noted for the number of its elderly well-to-do residents.
Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired (to his dismay), was really taking off - but that is another story, to be told in another place.
6. Other Writings
Despite all the fuss over The Lord of the Rings, between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (see above); one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse, Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo and The Pearl, and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun - and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Smith of Wootton Major.
The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien's death. The long-awaited Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father's incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales, "itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all" (Unfinished Tales, p. 6, paragraph 1).
The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market even for this relatively abstruse material and they decided to risk embarking on this "lengthy and complex study". Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth, under Christopher's editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. (Tolkien's publishers had changed hands, and names, several times between the start of the enterprise in 1983 and the appearance of the paperback edition of Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth, in 1997.)
7. Finis
After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 22 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads:
http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html#5
-
In total there is 1 user online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
Most users ever online was 871 on Fri Apr 19, 2024 12:00 am
About J.R.R. Tolkien
#113: Nov. - Jan. 2013 (Fiction)
Return to “The Hobbit - by J. R. R. Tolkien”
Jump to
- General Discussion
- ↳ Religion & Philosophy
- ↳ Current Events & History
- ↳ Science & Technology
- ↳ Arts & Entertainment
- ↳ Everything Else
- Non-Fiction Books
- ↳ The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - by Mark Manson
- ↳ What non-fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Non-Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!
- Fiction Books
- ↳ The Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood
- ↳ What fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Short Story Discussions
- ↳ Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book!
- Special Forums
- ↳ What are you currently reading?
- ↳ A Passion for Poetry
- ↳ Author's Lounge
- ↳ Creative Writing
- The Archives
- ↳ Archived Book Discussion Forums
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2022-2023
- ↳ Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Day of the Triffids - by John Wyndham
- ↳ The Hidden Life of Trees - by Peter Wohlleben
- ↳ How the World Really Works - by Vaclav Smil
- ↳ Slaughterhouse-Five - by Kurt Vonnegut
- ↳ How to Read the Constitution -- and Why - by Kim Wehle
- ↳ Big Time: Stories - by Jen Spyra
- ↳ Meditations - by Marcus Aurelius
- ↳ Divided We Fall - by David French
- ↳ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce... - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2020-2021
- ↳ Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars - by Jo Marchant
- ↳ Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - by Adam Grant
- ↳ Books do Furnish a Life - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Another Country - by James Baldwin
- ↳ Dracula - by Bram Stoker
- ↳ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - by Isabel Wilkerson
- ↳ To Kill a Mockingbird - by Harper Lee
- ↳ A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic - by Peter Wadhams
- ↳ The Rosie Project: A Novel - by Graeme Simsion
- ↳ The Righteous Mind - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2018-2019
- ↳ American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good - by Colin Woodard
- ↳ July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century - by Arthur C. Clarke
- ↳ The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution - by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
- ↳ Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - by James W. Loewen
- ↳ The Last Unicorn - by Peter S. Beagle
- ↳ Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped - by Garry Kasparov
- ↳ 1984 - by George Orwell
- ↳ Finding Purpose in a Godless World - by Ralph Lewis (Foreword by Michael Shermer)
- ↳ Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Time Machine - by H. G. Wells
- ↳ Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis - J. D. Vance
- ↳ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy - by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2016-2017
- ↳ Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- ↳ The Master and Margarita - by Mikhail Bulgakov
- ↳ A People's History of the United States - by Howard Zinn
- ↳ Darwin's Dangerous Idea - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - by Jules Verne
- ↳ A Short History of Nearly Everything - by Bill Bryson
- ↳ Uncle Tom's Cabin - by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- ↳ God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction - by Dan Barker, foreword by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - by Sebastian Junger
- ↳ The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition - by Ernest Hemingway
- ↳ Up From Slavery - by Booker T. Washington
- ↳ Soul Identity - by Dennis Batchelder
- ↳ On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2014-2015
- ↳ The Martian - by Andy Weir
- ↳ Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ The Post-American World: Release 2.0 - by Fareed Zakaria
- ↳ Go Set a Watchman: A Novel - by Harper Lee
- ↳ Flowers for Algernon - by Daniel Keyes
- ↳ Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief - by Lawrence Wright
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan with Ann Druyan
- ↳ King Henry IV, Part 1 (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Pt. 1) - by William Shakespeare
- ↳ Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century - by Lex Bayer and John Figdor
- ↳ Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus – by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- ↳ The Big Questions: Philosophy - Simon Blackburn
- ↳ Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki - by Stacy Trasancos
- ↳ The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One - by George R. R. Martin
- ↳ Tempesta's Dream: A Story of Love, Friendship and Opera - by Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
- ↳ Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2012-2013
- ↳ The Drowning Girl - by Caitlin R. Kiernan
- ↳ The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga - by Sylvain Tesson
- ↳ The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion: The Mormons - by David Fitzgerald
- ↳ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce
- ↳ The Divine Comedy - by Dante Alighieri
- ↳ The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Dubliners - by James Joyce
- ↳ My Name Is Red - by Orhan Pamuk
- ↳ The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Man Who Was Thursday - by G. K. Chesterton
- ↳ The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Lord Jim - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Hobbit - by J. R. R. Tolkien
- ↳ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - by Douglas Adams
- ↳ Atlas Shrugged - by Ayn Rand
- ↳ Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman
- ↳ World War Z - by Max Brooks
- ↳ Evolutionary Psychology - by Robin Dunbar, Louise Barrett, John Lycett
- ↳ Moby Dick; or, the Whale - by Herman Melville
- ↳ A Visit from the Goon Squad - by Jennifer Egan
- ↳ Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel - by Russell Banks
- ↳ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - by Thomas S. Kuhn
- ↳ Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised student edition - by Thomas Hobbes
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2010-2011
- ↳ The House of the Spirits - by Isabel Allende
- ↳ Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Falls: A Novel (P.S.) by Joyce Carol Oates
- ↳ Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection - by D.M. Murdock
- ↳ The Glass Bead Game: A Novel - by Hermann Hesse
- ↳ A Devil's Chaplain - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Hero with a Thousand Faces - by Joseph Campbell
- ↳ The Brothers Karamazov - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - by Mark Twain
- ↳ The Moral Landscape - by Sam Harris
- ↳ The Decameron - by Giovanni Boccaccio
- ↳ The Road - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Grand Design - by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
- ↳ The Evolution of God - by Robert Wright
- ↳ The Tin Drum - by Gunter Grass
- ↳ Good Omens - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - by Dan Ariely
- ↳ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel - by Haruki Murakami
- ↳ ALONE: Orphaned on the Ocean - by Richard Logan & Tere Duperrault Fassbender
- ↳ Don Quixote - Translated by Edith Grossman
- ↳ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - by Oliver Sacks
- ↳ Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - by Nikolai Gogol
- ↳ The Passion of the Western Mind - by Richard Tarnas
- ↳ The Left Hand of Darkness - by Ursula K. Le Guin
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2008-2009
- ↳ The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - by Lewis Carroll
- ↳ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle - by Chris Hedges
- ↳ The Sound and the Fury - by William Faulkner
- ↳ The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ When Good Thinking Goes Bad - by Todd C. Riniolo
- ↳ House of Leaves - by Mark Z. Danielewski
- ↳ American Gods: A Novel - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ The Enormous Room - by E.E. Cummings
- ↳ The Picture of Dorian Gray - by Oscar Wilde
- ↳ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Name of the Rose - by Umberto Eco
- ↳ Dreams From My Father - by Barack Obama
- ↳ Paradise Lost - by John Milton
- ↳ Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism - by Kevin Phillips
- ↳ The Secret Garden - by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- ↳ Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists - by Dan Barker
- ↳ The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien
- ↳ The Limits of Power - by Andrew Bacevich
- ↳ Lolita - by Vladimir Nabokov
- ↳ Orlando - by Virginia Woolf
- ↳ On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not - by Robert Burton
- ↳ 50 reasons people give for believing in a god - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ Walden - by Henry David Thoreau
- ↳ Exile and the Kingdom - by Albert Camus
- ↳ Our Inner Ape - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ Your Inner Fish - by Neil Shubin
- ↳ No Country for Old Men - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Age of American Unreason - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Ten Theories of Human Nature - by Leslie Stevenson & David Haberman
- ↳ Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2006-2007
- ↳ A Thousand Splendid Suns - by Khaled Hosseini
- ↳ The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - by Philip Zimbardo
- ↳ Responsibility and Judgment - by Hannah Arendt
- ↳ Godless in America: Conversations With an Atheist - by George A. Ricker
- ↳ Interventions - by Noam Chomsky
- ↳ Religious Expression and the American Constitution - by Franklyn S. Haiman
- ↳ Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future - by Bill McKibben
- ↳ The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Woman in the Dunes - by Abe Kobo
- ↳ Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction - by Eugenie Scott
- ↳ The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - by Michael Pollan
- ↳ I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 - by Robert Graves
- ↳ Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East - by David Fromkin
- ↳ The Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger
- ↳ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - by Sam Harris
- ↳ Ender's Game - by Orson Scott Card
- ↳ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - by Mark Haddon
- ↳ Value & Virtue in a Godless Universe - by Erik J. Wielenberg
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2004-2005
- ↳ The March: A Novel - by E.L. Doctorow
- ↳ The Ethical Brain - by Michael Gazzaniga
- ↳ Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Battle for God - by Karen Armstrong
- ↳ The Future of Life - by Edward O. Wilson
- ↳ What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live - by A.C. Grayling
- ↳ Civilization and It's Enemies: The Next Stage of History - by Lee Harris
- ↳ Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God - by Michael Shermer
- ↳ Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain - by Antonio Damasio
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2002-2003
- ↳ Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right - by Al Franken
- ↳ The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - by Matt Ridley
- ↳ The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Atheism: A Reader - edited by S. T. Joshi
- ↳ Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - by Dee Alexander Brown
- ↳ Future Shock - by Alvin Toffler
Quick Links
As an Amazon Associate BookTalk.org earns from qualifying purchases.