Humphrey Carpenter Collection

Humphrey Carpenter was born in Oxford in 1946. After reading English at Oxford, where Christopher Tolkien was one of his lecturers, he worked for some years for the BBC, and continued to broadcast after becoming a full-time writer in 1975. His biography of J.R.R. Tolkien was followed by The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends, and his other biographies include those of Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound. He wrote for children, including the bestselling and televised Mr Majeika books and he wrote book and lyrics for a children???s musical based on The Hobbit, for an Oxford choir school where J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith then saw it performed. He compiled, with his wife Mari Prichard, The Oxford Companion to Children???s Literature and followed that with Secret Gardens, a study of the golden age of children???s literature. He died in January 2005.