When I was in elementary school, we were all required to write a letter to an author. I wrote to Tolkien, and I got the worst response of anyone in my class – a form letter saying “Professor Tolkien gets lots of letters and is too busy to answer them”. One girl wrote to Dr. Seuss, and she was the winner. She got a hand-drawn card, and a lovely letter that started, “I get very few letters from my young readers,…”
Yeah, I’d been begging my parents to buy me The Silmarillion since its publication was announced. I was disappointed, too.
well, it’s been years since I read the Carpenter bio, but IIRC Allen & Unwin indicated that they didn’t want LOTR if they had to publish The Silmarillion as well, and for while he flirted with Collins instead. They didn’t like the idea any more than A & U did, and he went back to A & U.
