The book helped to launch Lewis’s career as a popular writer. Yet without Tolkien’s letter of praise to a publisher—much of it was dismissed as “bunk” by a reader assigned to the manuscript—the story might never have seen the light of day. “I read the story in the original manuscript and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it,” Tolkien said. “I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.”
