Fantasy books of the 1950s

Narnia, Middle-earth in full, and the golden age of children's fantasy.

The fifties were when fantasy fully arrived. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King between 1954 and 1955, releasing the book that would define epic fantasy for every generation after. C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opened the Narnia sequence in 1950 and ran through the decade. Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, and Jack Vance shaped the adult side of the genre with The Broken Sword, the Harold Shea stories, and The Dying Earth. T.H. White finished his Arthuriad. The shelf, suddenly, was crowded with classics.

Readers today come to the fifties for foundational works that earned their reputations. Content runs restrained — these books were largely written for general or younger audiences, with violence sketched cleanly and intimacy absent or implied. The prose is formal but immensely readable. This is the shelf for readers who want the source material, who want to read the books that every later fantasy author was responding to, and who don't mind a more polite register than modern fantasy offers.