[j. d. worthington]

TeiN: To be honest, I seriously doubt Tolkien would be published today, any more than Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Thorne Smith, James Branch Cabell, etc., etc., etc. I could be wrong, of course, but my feeling from what I've seen with the publishing world is that, had they not come along when they did, and when editors (and publishers) would sometimes take a chance on going against what seemed market sense for the sake of a good book, we would never have had them at all.

Once they were published, of course, they became (either immediately or over time) the "standard"... all because they were different from "the way it's done" at the time, and they had the talent and the genius to do it, and do it well....