'The Hobbit' was written by JRR Tolkien (John Ronald Rueul) and published in 1937, with the subtitle 'There and Back Again' (supposedly the title of the chief character, Bilbo Baggins's memoirs).
At the time of writing The Hobbit, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He was an expert on several languages, and later also became a professor of English Language and Literature.
According to his own account, he was marking students' papers one day and feeling quite bored, when he began scribbling on a piece of paper and found that he had written what was to become the opening line of The Hobbit. At first he made this into a story for his own children, but in 1936 a publisher saw the story and suggested publishing it. It was an immediate success and has been a best-seller ever since.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a darker work intended for older readers, took longer to complete as it was interrupted by, among other things, Tolkien's work in World War II.