In a world devastated by the cataclysm of war, two extraordinary authors and friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, delivered a bracing vision of the human story: a path back to goodness, beauty, and faith. How did they do it? For the first time, historian Joseph Loconte explains how the catastrophe of World War II trans­formed the lives and literary imagination of Tolkien and Lewis. The mechanized slaughter of the First World War had created a storm of disillusionment with the political and religious ideals of Western civilization. The new ideologies of Modernism, communism, Nazism, and totalitarianism rushed to fill the vacuum. At stake was a contest between civilization and barbarism. Tolkien and Lewis sought each other out in friendship and threw themselves into the struggle.