The Company They Keep is the first and most complete examination of the Inklings and their close literary collaboration. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien met each week with a community of fellow writers at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s, all sharing their works-in-progress. Diana Pavlac Glyer invites readers into the heart of the group, examining diary entries and personal letters and carefully comparing the rough drafts of their manuscripts with their final, published work. She discoveries not only demonstrates a high level of mutual influence, but it also provides a lively and compelling picture of how writers and other creative artists challenge, correct, and encourage one another when they work together in community.

The book is published by The Kent State University Press.

Winner of the Imperishable Flame Award for Tolkien Studies and the Mythopoetic Society Scholarship Award

"I found myself captured by Glyer's engaging writing style, the breadth of her research, and the cogency of her argument. It's good, very good indeed." (Verlyn Flieger, author of Splintered Light, A Question of Time, and Interrupted Music)

"An astonishingly thorough work, lucidly and boldly illuminating the collaborative writing processes of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and their colleagues during the most fruitful period of their careers." (Bruce L Edwards, author of Not-a-Tame Lion, Further Up and Further In, and A Rhetoric of Reading)