How about J R R Tolkein ?
JRR Tolkien did not have a happy life in TTL.
Tolkien served in the British Army during the First Great War, on the Western Front. He survived the war, only to return to a Britain shattered politically, economically, and socially by defeat in the conflict.
Tolkien managed to start an academic career at Oxford, where he developed what became a lifelong friendship with CS Lewis. However, his life would be irrevocably changed with the ascent of the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition in the early 1930s. Tolkien, being a religious Roman Catholic with German ancestry, and as someone who specialized in the study of the Germanic languages, gained the negative attention of the authorities, for all that he was uninvolved in organized political activity.
Tolkien did manage to write and publish a fantasy and adventure story,
The Hobbit, which was published in 1936 in TTL, with a broadly similar plot and cast of characters. However, this version of the story, with slight differences compared to our world, would not be explicitly tied into a larger fantasy setting during Tolkien’s lifetime.
In 1938, Tolkien resigned from his teaching position and emigrated with his family to New Zealand. This was prompted by the increasingly strident anti-Catholic themes that had started to permeate government propaganda, as part of a general propaganda campaign by the government against Ireland. Tolkien was followed into exile by his friend, CS Lewis, who left out of loyalty to his friend and due to his own dislike of the regime.
Tolkien and Lewis would remain close friends during the remainder of their lives in New Zealand, even though they disagreed on a number of points concerning religion and writing. In Lewis’s international bestselling
Mercenary saga, published in the 1950s, the character of Derrydol, an anthropomorphic river otter mercenary who is the best friend to the mercenary fox Scorpius, is said to have been based partially on Tolkien.
In New Zealand, Tolkien wrote and had published a single epic fantasy work:
The Fall of Numenor, detailing the downfall of a mighty island civilization and empire, at the hands of its increasingly cruel and tyrannical kings and the insidious corruption brought about by a captured dark lord. The story is thought by students of Tolkien’s work to be allegorical to the fall of the British Empire after the two Great Wars, although Tolkien himself disliked that kind of allegorical writing.
The Fall of Numenor was published to critical acclaim in Australia and New Zealand, but would not be published in the United States until the 1980s. US audiences generally did not respond to the political, moral, and philosophical aspects of
The Fall of Numenor, but were said to have responded positively to Tolkien’s elaborate descriptions of Numenor’s steam powered technology.
Tolkien was driven into despair upon learning of the German superbombings of London, Brighton, and Norwich, as well as learning of the Destruction. While he continued to write, none of his projects were completed to his satisfaction at the time of his death in 1973.
One of Tolkien’s children, Christopher Tolkien (a different person to our world’s Christopher Tolkien) would take upon himself the task of editing and getting published the two manuscripts that his father had completed as sequels to
The Fall of Numenor:
The Last Alliance, detailing the immediate fate of the survivors of Numenor who landed on the continent of Middle Earth, and
The Third Age, detailing the rise and gradual decline of the exile kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor.
Tolkien’s grandchildren continued the work of writing and publishing stories set in their grandfather’s fantastic world, based on his extensive notes and letters, but also increasingly willing to allow “the tale to grow in telling.” Since the publication of
The Last Alliance and
The Third Age, several other additions to the Tolkien family’s saga have been published:
The First Age (essentially an ATL version of
The Silmarllion);
The Three Lines (an epic saga of an alternate version of Rohan);
The Restoration (an alternate version of
The Lord of the Rings, and specifically,
The Return of the King, with an ATL version of Aragorn as the protagonist);
The Blue Wizards (set in an ATL version of the far east of Arda, with its magical protagonists initially trying to undermine the dark lord’s power in the region, only to fall themselves). More volumes in the saga are expected to be published later in TTL’s 2020s.
This alternate version of Tolkien’s
Legendarium has some significant differences compared to our world, in its setting and content. For one, the Elves and Dwarves are shown to be at the height of their power in TTL’s saga, rather than fading as in our world’s version. The technological level of several of the civilizations, including the ATL versions of Gondor and Arnor, are shown to have steam powered technology, even as gunpowder weaponry has yet to spread. In TTL, the events of
The Hobbit were not explicitly tied into the same setting as
The Fall of Numenor, although the Shire is mentioned in passing in
The Third Age. This meant that a plot similar to the OTL saga centered around the Ring of Power and the War of the Ring doesn’t exist in TTL, though enchanted jewels, which bring their wearers great power and wisdom, are present throughout the series.